25 years on, 2 excops get life term for enforced disappearance of man
CBI court awards sentence to accused under Section 374 (abduction for murder) of IPC, Amritsar resident has been missing since Nov 1992 when he was taken away from his house by cops
MOHALI:A CBI court here on Saturday awarded life term to two former Punjab Police personnel in the case of enforced disappearance of a 22-year-old Amritsar man in 1992.
The decision comes three days after another CBI court awarded life sentence to two ex-cops for the fake encounter of an Amritsar teen 26 years ago.
“You will spend the rest of your life in jail,” said additional district and sessions judge Harjeet Singh, while awarding life sentence to inspector Gian Singh and sub-inspector Narinder Singh Malhi under section 364 (abduction for murder) of the Indian Penal Code.
The court has also imposed a fine of Rs 60,000 each on the duo. The money shall be paid to the family of Harjit Singh, alias Gora, who has been missing since he was abducted by the cops from his house at Patti Balol village in Amritsar’s Sultanwind.
As per the CBI, on November 11, 1992, sub-inspector Malhi and his team came to Gora’s house around 3 am and forcibly bundled him and his father Balbir Singh into a jeep after blindfolding them and drove away. While Balbir was taken to the Sultanwind police station, Gora was whisked away to some undisclosed location, said the CBI.
A day later, Balbir was shifted to Vijaynagar police post under the Sadar police station jurisdiction. Later, Gian Singh, then in-charge of the post, kept Balbir in illegal detention in a godown near the police post for 20 days. .
“Balbir was released on intervention of co-villagers. There is no information about Harjit’s whereabouts to date,” said advocate Satnam Singh who represented the complainant.
“This is a case of enforced disappearance, where a state agency picked up a man and does not even acknowledge the same. It is in fact worse than the murder,” said advocate RS Bains, another counsel.
BRANDING CASE: 3-YEAR SENTENCE UPHELD
A CBI court has also dismissed the appeal of sub-inspector Narinder Singh Malhi and two others against a three-year jail term awarded to him by a Patiala court in 2016 for forcibly tattooing ‘jeb katris’ on the forehead of four women pickpockets.
The two other cops convicted for the 1993 crime are former superintendent of police Sukhdev Singh Cheena and assistant sub-inspector Kanwaljit Singh. Cheena and Malhi, posted in Amritsar, had detained four women on the charge of stealing a Canadian national’s purse.