‘Khalistan links’: NIA seeks access to gadgets of two dismissed cops

The Chandigarh district court has issued a notice to the probing officer concerned after the National Investigation Agency (NIA) moved an application seeking handover of digital articles seized from two dismissed Punjab Police officials arrested in a criminal case in 2022.

The notice has been issued for the next date of hearing -April 21. The NIA had filed a petition to issue directions to the investigating officer of the criminal case to handover the confiscated articles belonging to former Punjab Police sub-inspectors Sarabjit Singh and Satwant Singh Sidhu.

They are among the Punjab cops whose names figured in the fake promotion list case. The matter came to the fore in January 2022 when an official posted at the Punjab DGP office in Chandigarh’s Sector 9 approached the police saying he had received four fake promotion orders under the forged signature of then Punjab DGP Siddharth Chattopadhyaya.

The NIA mentioned in its petition, that it had registered a case in February 2022 under Sections 13, 17, 18, 18 B, 38 and 40 of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act against unidentified persons.

The central government had received intel that some proscribed terror organisations espousing creation of ‘Khalistan’ were operating from foreign locations and facilitating smuggling of narcotics, arms, ammunition into Punjab from across the border under a conspiracy to give effect to their terror activities.

“Information was received that Sarabjit, a dismissed Punjab Police official with a known criminal history, claims to be in touch with the entities indulging in smuggling of arms, ammunition and narcotics from across the border from Pakistan,” the NIA mentioned.