Missing Australian NRI Murdered in Amritsar. ‘He Loved Punjab So Much…’: Daughter’s Plea Ends in Grief

Missing Australian NRI murdered: Surbhi Sharma had begged Punjab’s chief minister to bring her father home. Police did find Sunil Sharma — in a canal near Harike, allegedly killed by the brother he had trusted with his properties.

North Desk Bureau  

Chandigarh , June 7

When Surbhi Sharma recorded a video appeal from Melbourne asking Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann to find her missing father, she chose her words with a daughter’s precision. “My father is a Punjabi,” she said, “and he loves Punjab. He loved Punjab so much that he invested his money to buy property there.” It was an appeal to sentiment, to shared identity, to the idea that a man who had given something to this land deserved to have it give something back.

Missing Australian NRI: The land gave back a body.

On June 6, the Amritsar Rural Police confirmed that Sunil Sharma — 66 years old, a mathematics teacher in Melbourne for decades — had been murdered. His remains were recovered from a canal near Harike.

Missing Australian NRI: Four people were arrested, among them his own brother, Satish Sharma, also known as Sunny; Satish’s wife Anushka; their son; and a local property dealer, Lakshman Singh Bal. Two more suspects remain at large.

“He loved Punjab so much that he invested his money to buy property there.” The same investment — a bungalow in Aishana Estate, a prime plot in Mohali — is reported to have become the motive for his murder.

Sunil Sharma had arrived in Amritsar on May 22, 2026, with a mundane agenda: oversee painting work at his bungalow in Aishana Estate and attend to a property matter. His phone went silent that same day.

A friend, Gaurav Kandhari of Fatehgarh Churian, filed a missing persons report the following morning at Kambo police station. A kidnapping case was registered under Section 364 IPC. Police began looking.

As investigators analysed CCTV footage, mobile records and call data, the inquiry converged on a single name: Satish Sharma. The victim’s own brother, police say, had been running a quiet and systematic operation to strip Sunil of everything he owned in Punjab.

Satish had allegedly fabricated a fraudulent power of attorney, executed in Ludhiana, designed to allow him to sell and transfer Sunil’s assets — including the Aishana Estate bungalow and a separate property in Mohali valued at over Rs 4 crore. A local property dealer, Bal, was allegedly part of the network.

Senior Superintendent of Police Kanwalpreet Singh Chahal told a press conference that Sunil was first rendered unconscious with sleeping pills, then killed by blunt force trauma to the head. His body was disposed of in the canal. The entire operation, police say, was calibrated around a property fraud estimated at Rs 5–6 crore in total.

Key facts in the case

Victim: Sunil Sharma, 66, mathematics teacher, Melbourne, Australia

Went missing: May 22, 2026, Amritsar

Body recovered: Canal near Harike, Amritsar district

Cause of death: Bludgeoned after being spiked with sleeping pills

Arrested: Brother Satish Sharma (Sunny), wife Anushka, son, property dealer Lakshman Singh Bal

Motive: Property fraud — forged power of attorney, assets worth Rs 5–6 crore

Satish Sharma: also wanted by Himachal Pradesh Police in a separate NDPS case

Two suspects remain absconding; raids underway

Daughter had appealed to CM

Missing Australian NRI: While police worked the case in Punjab, Surbhi was working it from Australia. She had posted her video appeal publicly, tagging the Chief Minister’s office, and it spread rapidly through Punjabi diaspora networks across Melbourne, Sydney and beyond.

Australian media picked up the story. The family simultaneously approached Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) and the Australian High Commission in New Delhi — two governments alerted to the disappearance of one man in Amritsar.

Surbhi’s video did not ask for anything extraordinary. She asked that “available resources” be sent to find a father whose phone was off and whose whereabouts were unknown. She described him as someone who had returned repeatedly to Punjab not despite his life in Australia but because of his attachment to the state.

The property he owned — the house being painted, the plot in Mohali — was not an investment in the financial sense so much as evidence of roots maintained across continents.

Those roots, investigators say, are precisely what Satish exploited. A brother residing in Punjab, trusted to look after what the NRI could not manage from 10,000 kilometres away, had instead spent years building a case to take it all. The fraudulent PoA was not improvised — it was prepared in Ludhiana, a separate city, suggesting planning and an attempt to distance the paperwork from the crime scene. Satish was already wanted in a Himachal Pradesh NDPS case when he allegedly orchestrated his brother’s murder.

NRI properties

The case of Missing Australian NRI and his murder has exposed the architecture of vulnerability that many NRIs carry without fully reckoning with: property in Punjab, managed at a distance, held together by trust in a family member who visits on their behalf, signs on their behalf, and over time — in some cases — acts on their behalf without authorisation. Sunil Sharma came to Amritsar to get paint on a wall. He walked into a conspiracy that had been waiting for him.

Surbhi Sharma’s appeal to Bhagwant Mann went viral because it was human and desperate and said what families in her position rarely say out loud — that Punjab owes something to those who kept faith with it. The answer she received was not the one she asked for.

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