SHO Satnam Singh of Jhabal

Satnam Singh was a Punjab Police officer who in 1995 was station house officer (SHO) of Jhabal police station in the Tarn Taran area. He is one of four police officers whose life sentences for the abduction of the human rights defender Jaswant Singh Khalra the Supreme Court upheld in 2011. Many other men named Satnam Singh appear in the records of Punjab's years of violence; this page is only about the Jhabal SHO.

What the courts found: On 18 November 2005 the Additional Sessions Judge at Patiala convicted Satnam Singh, with Prithipal Singh, Surinderpal Singh and Jasbir Singh, of criminal conspiracy and of kidnapping with intent to murder (sections 120-B and 364/34 of the Indian Penal Code), and sentenced him to seven years' rigorous imprisonment for the kidnapping. The High Court dismissed his appeal on 8 October 2007. On 16 October 2007, on a revision petition by Paramjit Kaur Khalra, it raised that sentence from seven years to life imprisonment. On 4 November 2011 the Supreme Court dismissed his appeal, recording concurrent findings that all the appellants were guilty of abducting Khalra with intent to eliminate him.

The account in Reduced to Ashes: The report of the Committee for Coordination on Disappearances in Punjab sets out the CBI's case record and the statements of Special Police Officer Kuldip Singh. These are accounts, not findings of the report. It calls Satnam Singh an old confidant of SSP Ajit Singh Sandhu and says he was moved to Jhabal after Khalra challenged K. P. S. Gill to an open debate, with Kuldip Singh as his bodyguard (pp. 62 to 63). In Kuldip Singh's account, one evening in October 1995 Satnam Singh drove Khalra in a private Maruti car to Sandhu's house at Manawala village, where Gill and another senior officer questioned him; on the way back Satnam Singh told Khalra he could have saved himself by following Gill's advice (p. 62). On 28 October 1995, the account goes, Khalra was shot dead under interrogation at Jhabal and his body dumped in the Harike canal; Kuldip Singh named Satnam Singh among the officers who took the body to the canal (pp. 62, 70). The report says Gill categorically denied ever visiting Sandhu's house in that period (p. 70).

Key moments

• October 1995: Khalra is held at Jhabal; he is killed, in Kuldip Singh's account, on 28 October.
• 25 July 1998: the Patiala sessions court orders him and four other officers tried for kidnapping with intent to murder (p. 71).
• 18 November 2005: convicted at Patiala. 16 October 2007: sentence raised to life. 4 November 2011: appeal dismissed.

What he is remembered for: for being among the four officers whose life sentences for Khalra's abduction were upheld. That is the Court's finding; the account of Khalra's last days is the report's record of witness statements.