Bhai Jagtar Singh Tara

Jagtar Singh Tara comes from a village in Ropar district. He was arrested in Delhi on 13 September 1995, less than a fortnight after Punjab Chief Minister Beant Singh was killed in a bomb blast outside the civil secretariat in Chandigarh on 31 August 1995. The bomber, Dilawar Singh, and others died with him.

On the night of 21 and 22 January 2004 Tara escaped from the Model Jail at Burail, Chandigarh, with Jagtar Singh Hawara and Paramjit Singh Bheora, through a tunnel of about 100 feet. He then stayed at large for eleven years.

Key moments

• January 2015: Thai police arrested him at a house in East Pattaya on 5 January (Pattaya Mail, 8 January 2015; Free Press Journal, 17 January 2015). The Tribune says he had been on the run for 11 years. He was deported to India, as the Free Press Journal reported on 17 January. The Tribune of 19 March 2015 gives the arrest as 7 January, its report of 18 March 2018 says January 2010, and ThePrint says September 2015.
• 17 March 2018: a Chandigarh court, sitting inside Burail jail, sentenced him to life imprisonment until natural death for the Beant Singh assassination. The CBI had asked for death, but the court did not treat the case as the rarest of the rare. The Tribune reported that Tara told the court he did not regret the killing of Beant Singh, who was Chief Minister when he was killed, but did regret the deaths of the innocent people killed in the blast.
• October 2024: the Punjab and Haryana High Court upheld the acquittal of Hawara and Tara in a case alleging an attempt to break the Model Jail at Burail, in which RDX was allegedly recovered.
• 28 October 2025: a Jalandhar court acquitted him in a 2009 UAPA and Arms Act case registered at Bhogpur. The judge called it a case of no evidence, and held that the prosecution had not proved he was a member of Babbar Khalsa International or that he had conspired with the other accused or raised funds for the acts alleged.

Neither acquittal frees him: he remains in Burail jail serving the life sentence.

What he is remembered for: Tara is counted with Hawara and Bheora among the Beant Singh case accused who walked out of Burail in 2004. ThePrint's January 2023 explainer on the campaign to release Sikh prisoners known as Bandi Singhs names him among the convicts in the Beant Singh case.