Hindustan Times (Chandigarh)

SIT COLLECTS HANDWRITIN­G SAMPLE OF DERA FOLLOWER

- Parteek Singh Mahal parteek.singh@htlive.com

FARIDKOT: The special investigat­ion team (SIT) probing the 2015 sacrilege incidents has again collected handwritin­g sample of a dera Sacha Sauda follower to match it with the writing on derogatory posters that were pasted at Bargari village in 2015.

Sukhjinder Singh, alias Sunny, who is in two-day police custody, was presented before a court with a request to collect his handwritin­g samples claiming that one of the derogatory posters was written by him.

The court of judicial magistrate Tarjini on Tuesday allowed SIT’S applicatio­n and samples were collected by the probe team. The SIT said the sample will be sent to the Forensic Science Lab.

The SIT led by inspector general of police Surinder Pal Singh Parmar arrested four dera followers saying the posters were pasted by them on the directions of dera’s three national committee members.

In the three posters that appeared at Bargari and Burj Jawahar Singh Wala villages on September 24-25, 2015, it was threatened that the “bir” (copy) of Guru Granth Sahib stolen from Burj Jawahar Singh Wala on June 1 that year would be torn if the Dera Sacha Sauda chief Gurmeet Ram Rahim-starrer film Messenger of God (MSG)-2 was not allowed to be released in Punjab.

The SIT, then led then deputy inspector general (DIG) Ranbir Singh Khatra in 2018, claimed that the handwritin­g of the accused dera followers has matched with the one on the posters.

But the CBI in its closure report filed in a Mohali court in July 2019 said the handwritin­g samples of the accused dera followers it had sent to the Central Forensic Science Laboratory (CFSL) in Delhi did not match with the ones on the posters.

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from India