SPO Kuldip Singh

Kuldip Singh (also spelt Kuldeep Singh in press reports) was a special police officer (SPO No. 606/TT) in the Tarn Taran police district. In 1998 he told the CBI that he had been in charge of Jaswant Singh Khalra's custody at Jhabal police station in October 1995, and had seen Khalra tortured and killed there. The account is his own and is contested; the courts' view of it is given below. According to Reduced to Ashes, he was recruited as an SPO in February 1994 after giving SHO Satnam Singh information that led to arrests in operations led by DGP KPS Gill and SSP Ajit Singh Sandhu, and he became SHO Satnam Singh's bodyguard at Jhabal police station.

What he told the CBI (statements of 2 March 1998 and later that year): Khalra was kept for days in a guarded room at Jhabal and tortured, including by Sandhu. One evening SHO Satnam Singh drove him to Sandhu's house at Manawala village, where, he said, DGP KPS Gill and another senior officer came and questioned him. On 28 October 1995, about 7 p.m., DSP Jaspal Singh and two SHOs interrogated him at Jhabal and he was shot dead; the body was driven off in an unnumbered van and dumped in the Harike canal about 10 p.m. An earlier summary of his statement in the same book (pp. 9 to 10) gives a different night and place; the book does not reconcile them. Gill "categorically denied" visiting Sandhu's house.

Pressure and the complaint

• He said nothing while Sandhu lived. In 1997 he asked the new DGP for the permanent post promised to him and got no reply. Balwinder Singh, a former head constable who had become a human rights activist, put him in touch with the CBI and went with him to Jhabal police station to ask for protection.
• After his first statement, the book says, SHO Satnam Singh and DSP Jaspal Singh took him to the SSP at Jalandhar, where he was given Rs 50,000 and made to file a complaint that Paramjit Kaur Khalra had tried to bribe him. A case followed against her and others; his parents told a press conference on 21 April 1998 that the story was false, and The Tribune says the case was cancelled within weeks after the CBI stepped in. Amnesty International reported that he had also reportedly told a magistrate that members of the Khalra Action Committee had confined him for a month.

The CBI and the courts: On 22 November 1999 the CBI told the Patiala court that his statement "does not inspire confidence" and was "unsubstantiated in material particulars", because it came two and a half years after the events. The book's authors answer each of its six grounds and call two of them "malicious". He gave evidence in the Khalra trial at Patiala in February 2005; The Tribune reported that he said he had "resisted severe pressure from the accused police officials". On 4 November 2011 the Supreme Court noted that he kept quiet until Sandhu's death and changed his version, and that police records did not corroborate him. It held that, given the threats to witnesses, variation in his version was natural, and that his deposition on the illegal detention, the killing and the dumping of the body "can safely be relied upon", as other evidence corroborated it.

What he is remembered for: as the one insider who told the CBI how Khalra died, at risk to himself, and whose account the Supreme Court relied on in part.