Kikkar Singh

Kikkar Singh, of Jaura village under Patti police station, is the man who told the CBI he saw Jaswant Singh Khalra in police custody 48 days after Khalra's abduction. He was being held illegally himself at the time. He became the first prosecution witness (PW.1) in the trial of the policemen accused of Khalra's abduction and murder. What the sources opened say of him comes from Reduced to Ashes (2003), Amnesty International's report of 1998 and the Supreme Court's judgment of 4 November 2011.

Key moments

• 14 October to 11 November 1995: he was held illegally, including at Kang police station in Tarn Taran district. An inquiry by the Chief Judicial Magistrate of Chandigarh, on the High Court's order, corroborated this, and the High Court gave him compensation.
• 24 October 1995: he saw Khalra, 48 days after the abduction, in illegal detention at Kang police station. He saw injuries on Khalra's body and helped him eat before Khalra was taken away, never to be seen again. The Governor's sanction order of 19 August 1996, for the prosecution of nine Punjab Police officials, records this.
• 21 March and 29 May 1996: he gave statements to the CBI.
• By 1998: Reduced to Ashes says police had implicated him in five criminal cases, and that in four the High Court granted him bail while police kept him in custody in the fifth. Amnesty International reported in 1998 that the latest case, in which he and members of his family were charged with attempted murder, left him in judicial custody at Nabha jail, and that lawyers called the charges false and an attempt to make him withdraw his statement.
• The trial: the Supreme Court's judgment records that he, as PW.1, "turned hostile because of threats" although he had been given security. It finds that police officials persistently put undue pressure on witnesses throughout the investigation and trial, and registered false cases against several, among them Paramjit Kaur Khalra and Rajiv Singh. The court dismissed the policemen's appeals on 4 November 2011.

What he is remembered for: as the first witness to place Khalra alive in police custody after the abduction, and as one of the witnesses against whom, the Supreme Court says, police pressure was used. SPO Kuldip Singh told the CBI that police officers said "We have implicated Kikkar Singh" in many cases.