B.R. Model School Interrogation Centre

The B.R. Model School Interrogation Centre was a police interrogation centre in the middle of Amritsar city, used during the Punjab counter-insurgency of the early 1990s. It is recorded in Reduced to Ashes, the 2003 report of the Committee for Coordination on Disappearances in Punjab (CCDP), which gathered families' accounts case by case.

The report says Punjab Police officers took people there, and that the centre operated under the direct authority of Amritsar's senior superintendent of police. It calls the centre well known as a place where illegally detained people were tortured before being killed in staged encounters (p. 170).

Cases the report records

• 1 July 1992: Punjab Police raided the house of Udham Singh, a 62-year-old farmer of Thathgarh village, and took him and his son Hazura Singh to the centre. Hazura Singh was held there until 7 July, the day newspapers reported that Udham Singh had been killed in an encounter on the night of 5 to 6 July. The report says the Sadar police cremated him without telling the family. The CBI filed a closure report in 1999 and a supplementary one in 2000, saying no fresh evidence had come up; the report calls this surprising, as Hazura Singh had been held at the centre with his father (pp. 168 to 170).
• 10 November 1992: police took Baljinder Singh from his father's farm house. Next morning his family looked for him at Mattewal police station, the Mall Mandi centre and this centre; the senior superintendent of police told them Amritsar police had not arrested him (p. 174).
• Late October 1992: a joint force of Punjab Police and the CRPF took Sukhdev Singh and his younger son Jaswinder to the centre and questioned them about the whereabouts of Sukhdev's elder son. They were then moved to Sultanwind police station and the CIA staff centre at Tarn Taran. Jaswinder told the CCDP that he was hung upside down and beaten with sticks, had his legs pulled apart until the thigh muscles ruptured, and was given electric shocks. Both were released five days later, after the teachers' union in Punjab threatened to strike (p. 189).
• Undated: Bahal Singh went to the centre after reading reports of a press conference about his son Nishan Singh's confession. He saw Nishan Singh blindfolded and tied being taken out in a police vehicle, and was told he would be produced before a magistrate. The police did not produce him; a constable later led Bahal Singh to a cell where his son lay unable to move from torture. The report says the police later killed Nishan Singh in a staged encounter (p. 176).

What it means today. The families in the report went from police station to interrogation centre looking for sons who had been taken, and were often told that the police did not have them. The accounts above are the families' accounts as the CCDP recorded them, not court findings.