Feb
23
SS Virk reveals police falsely tagged unidentified bodies
February 23, 2006 | Comments Off on SS Virk reveals police falsely tagged unidentified bodies
A recent article by IBN Live highlighted the problem of faked police encounters during the counter-insurgency in Punjab. KPS Gill, the director-general of Punjab police at the time, was responsible for the police campaign of torture, enforced disappearances, and killings.
Branded conveniently as terrorists, hundreds of innocent men fall prey to police bullets during the heydays of terrorism in Punjab.
However, even this understates the problem of faked encounters; Jaswant Singh Khalra found that about 25,000 people in Punjab were killed in fake encounters or police custody and illegally cremated. Reduced to Ashes: The Insurgency and Human Rights in Punjab cites Khlara’s findings and documents hundreds of cases of enforced disappearances, torture, and extrajudicial killing by Punjab police.
On February 19, current director-general of Punjab police SS Virk revealed that during the counter-insurgency, militants who helped the police were covertly rehabilitated and falsely declared dead by the police.
This information was revealed in a press conference with SS Virk and Sukhwinder Singh Sukhi, one such former militant. Sukhi was falsely declared dead in a 1992 encounter with police. All cases against him were then closed.
In order to declare these militants dead, the police tagged their names on unidentified bodies. This raises the question of who the unidentified bodies were and how they were killed.
Many dreaded terrorists, declared “dead”, had been rehabilitated by the police and provided a false identity. Their names were tagged on unidentified bodies to pronounce them dead and cases against them were closed, he added.
Admitting that the police had to cremate a number of unidentified bodies following different encounters with militants, Mr Virk said one such dead body was claimed to be that of Sukhi, who was subsequently declared dead.
However, Virk said he did not have details on how many terrorists owe their existence today to the 2,097 unclaimed bodies that were illegally cremated by Punjab police. He said there could be “many”.
However, this figure of 2,097 only refers to the number of illegal cremations in Amritsar district, not in the entire state of Punjab.
Further, Sukhi became a police informant after they tortured him. Sukhi was first arrested by the Amritsar police in 1987 and spent the next three years in prison. After he was released, he was arrested twice more.
“It was the time when I was tortured and the police planned to kill me, but I escaped.” In 1992, Sukhi claimed, he was “picked by the CRPF at Jalandhar, was goaded to shun violence”.
He added that after the police decided to use his knowledge of militant activities, they declared him dead to ensure his safety.
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