Indian police torturing suspects

INDIA - Indian police are torturing suspects – including using sexual abuse, forms of waterboarding and beatings with a “truth-seeking belt” – a new Human Rights Watch investigation has claimed. A report released by the rights group yesterday said that more than 590 suspects had died in police custody between 2010 and 2015, and though mistreatment had been alleged in many cases, no police officers had been convicted in that time. Rules intended to curb the number of deaths in custody, such as bringing a suspect before a magistrate within 24 hours of their arrest, were routinely ignored, it said. In one case highlighted in the report, police said a man named Shyamu Singh killed himself in custody in April 2012. But his brother, who was also arrested, told investigators the pair had been held down by four officers while another “poured water down my nose continuously”.

Police told Singh’s family that he had died by consuming poison. An internal investigation cleared police of any involvement in his death, but an initial inquiry by state authorities concluded that seven police officers had tortured and poisoned the 35-yearold to death. Nonetheless, all seven were exonerated in the final report. In another case, one of 17 featured in the report, a police head constable admitted that a suspect in a counterfeiting investigation had been beaten with a satyashodhak patta, or “truth-seeking belt. He was so weak after the beating that when he got up to drink water, he was dizzy with pain and collapsed against the window, breaking his lower jaw.”

Procedures to investigate deaths in custody are regularly flouted, the report said. Less than a third of the 97 deaths in 2015 led to a judicial inquiry, while no autopsy was conducted in 26 cases.

(Theguardian.com)