Six police officials convicted in Khalra case

Who: Six Punjab Police personnel, among them Deputy Superintendent of Police Jaspal Singh, convicted for the abduction and killing of Jaswant Singh Khalra. His widow, Paramjit Kaur Khalra, pursued the case, with counsel Rajvinder Singh Bains and, according to Ensaaf, private attorneys it worked with.

What: In mid-November 2005 a court at Patiala convicted six police personnel; The Tribune's report is datelined Chandigarh, 19 November. DSP Jaspal Singh and a serving inspector were given life imprisonment, and four others seven years' rigorous imprisonment. The Tribune wrote that it took the courts more than ten years to convict them. Khalra had been taken from outside his Amritsar home on 6 September 1995, and his body was never found.

The trial had turned on witnesses. In February 2005 a former Special Police Officer, Kuldeep Singh, told the Patiala court that he had fed Khalra in illegal confinement, heard two shots and seen blood on his chest, and alleged that the body was thrown into a canal at Harike. Ensaaf and Human Rights Watch say police threatened and illegally detained witnesses and filed false cases against some of them.

The Tribune added two facts about Jaspal Singh. He had received the President's Police Medal for Meritorious Service less than a year before the abduction, and weeks before the verdict the Governor had pardoned him in a separate case in which he had been sentenced to seven years for the kidnapping and death of Amrik Singh. A petition challenging that pardon was pending. Counsel for Khalra's widow said they could not be sure he would not be let off again.

Where: A court at Patiala, Punjab, for an abduction carried out in Amritsar.

Why it mattered: Police officers were convicted in this case. On appeal the Punjab and Haryana High Court raised the seven-year sentences to life in October 2007, and on 4 November 2011 the Supreme Court upheld the life terms. Ensaaf and Human Rights Watch wrote in 2007 that officials had yet to be held accountable for the thousands of custodial deaths and disappearances in Punjab, that none of the key officials who bear substantial responsibility had been brought to justice, and that despite eyewitness testimony placing then DGP K.P.S. Gill in Khalra's detention, the CBI had yet to bring charges against him. Ensaaf says that more than twenty years after the murder no senior officer had been held accountable, and that Gill died in 2017 without facing trial.