Under Sl. No. 26/57, the list identifies the 05 November 1988 cremation of Dalbir Singh, alias Beera, s/o Surjan Singh, r/o Kang, carried out by SHO Surinder Singh of Tarn Taran’s Sadar police station under FIR No. 146/88. The postmortem report is marked as PS?68/88. The cause of death is given to be “police encounter.”

The Committee has the following information in this case through its Incident-Report Form No. CCDP/01241. Manjit Kaur, the victim’s widow, is the main informant.

Dalbir Singh, s/o Surjan Singh, resident of Kang, Chhote Kang under Tarn Taran’s Sadar police station, was a forty-year old farmer with 14 acres of land. He was married to Manjit Kaur and had three sons and two daughters. Dalbir Singh was a baptized Sikh.

The offficials from Tarn Taran Sadar police station suspected Dalbir of having militant connections and began to raid his house in early 1988. When the house was first raided, Dalbir Singh was away and the police, accompanied by a team of the Central Reserve Police Force, took away his sons, Teja Singh and Subeg Singh. The police brutally tortured both of them but released them after some days when the village elders intervened and promised to locate Dalbir Singh and produce him before the police. Both Teja Singh and Subeg Singh were also told to report daily to their village police post.

Police officials at Tarn Taran Sadar police station told the village elders that Dalbir Singh’s family had been giving shelter to Sikh militants. The family members admitted the charge but argued that since their house was situated on farmland, in the outskirts of the village, they could not refuse shelter to armed militants when they turned up unannounced and demanded food. Fed up by these harassments and the pressure from frequent police raids, the family decided to shift residence to Delhi where Dalbir Singh’s brother Gurdial Singh had a house. Gurdial Singh owned a transport lorry for his livelihood. Dalbir Singh also went to Delhi.

Towards the end of October 1988, on the 30th or 31st, a team of police officers from Tarn Taran raided Gurdial Singh’s house in Delhi and took Dalbir Singh, his son Teja Singh, his brother Gurdial Singh and the driver of his truck Dara Singh, originally from Lalpura village, with them to Tarn Taran. Dalbir Singh’s wife Manjit Kaur, along with her daughters and the youngest son Major Singh, went away to her parents’ home in Uttar Pradesh.

On 5 November 1988, the police staged an “encounter” near village Pakho Ke in which Dalbir Singh and his son Teja Singh were shown killed along with three others. The encounter was reported in the local newspapers, based on a statement issued by SSP Sanjiv Gupta. A report in Daily Ajit, published on 6 November 1988, only identified Dalbir Singh by his alias Beera and his village name, Kang. The SSP referred to him as a hardcore terrorist.

The CBI’s first list only refers to the 5th November 1988 cremation of Dalbir Singh. His son Teja Singh’s cremation is recorded in the CBI’s list of partially identified cremations, under Sl. No. 08/56, and is summarized in the appropriate section of this report. The family was not informed about the cremations.

Dalbir Singh’s brother Gurdial Singh and his driver were implicated in criminal cases and sent to jail. Gurdial Singh came out on bail after six months.

Some weeks after this incident, Dalbir Singh’s younger son Subeg Singh went to Punjab to make inquiries and to arrange for the care of his home and agricultural land. He stayed for a night in his paternal aunt’s house in village Talwandi Sobha Singh Wali and then started for Amritsar in a bus. The police reportedly nabbed him on the way, near Jhabbal and also killed him in an “encounter”.

Manjit Kaur and her remaining children did not return to their village until 1990. Gurdial Singh too moved his residence to Bombay where he now lives. The police continued to raid the house after Manjit Kaur returned to her village in 1990, picking up Major Singh for interrogation. Manjit Kaur sold some acres of her land to bribe the police officials so that they may not kill him also. ')"

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