Activist Khalra custodial death: SC upholds life in jail for Punjab cops

Express news service, Sat, Nov 05, 2011, New Delhi:

The Supreme Court on Friday upheld the sentence of life imprisonment to five Punjab Police officials including DSP Jaspal Singh in the custodial death case of Amritsar-based human rights activist Jaswant Singh Khalra in 1995.

Jaswant Singh Khalra was a human rights activist and had been general secretary, Human Rights Wing of the Shiromani Akali Dal. He had been working on abduction and cremation of unclaimed/unidentified bodies during the disturbed period in Punjab, particularly in Amritsar and Taran Taran districts, a Bench led by Justice B S Chauhan quoted from CBI records.

“The police had been eliminating the young persons under the pretext of being militants and was disposing of their dead bodies without maintaining any record and without performing their last rites,” the court observed in its judgment on Friday.

Recounting the prosecution version, the judgment records that the police had hatched a conspiracy and abducted Khalra on September 6, 1995 from his residence, kept him in illegal detention, killed him and disposed his body in a canal.

Noting that “police atrocities are always violative of the constitutional mandate”, the judgment said “tolerance of police atrocities, as in the instant case, would amount to acceptance of systematic subversion and erosion of the rule of law”.

“We do not find any reason to interfere with the well reasoned judgment and order of the High Court. The facts of the case do not warrant review of the findings recorded by the courts below,” the Bench said.

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