Under Sl. No. 45/115, the list identifies the 07 August 1989 cremation of Gurdev Singh, s/o Amrik Singh, r/o Harike, carried out by ASI Govinder Singh of Harike police station under FIR No. 60/89. The postmortem report is marked as VKA 65/89 and the death is attributed to “firearm injuries”.

The Committee has the following information through its Incident-Report Form No. CCDP/01593. The main informant is Harjit Kaur, the victim’s widow.

Twenty-six year old Gurdev Singh, s/o Amrik Singh and Mohinder Kaur, from Purana Harike under Patti subdivision of Amritsar district, was, unusually for a Jat Sikh of Punjab, clean-shaven. This indicated that he was not religiously observant. Gurdev, the oldest of two brothers and a small farmer, was married to Harjit Kaur. He was the father of two sons and a daughter. No one in his family had ever been involved in political or militant activities and the police had never arrested him.

In the evening of 06 August 1989, around 6 or 7 p.m., Gurdev was walking back to his house after finishing the day’s work in the fields, when a group of police officers from Harike mistook him for a militant they had been chasing and opened fire. Gurdev received bullet injuries on his forehead, neck and arm and he dropped dead on the spot. The family members did not learn about the incident until the next morning when, while searching for him, some villagers found Gurdev’s dead body. Soon, the Harike police arrived and took the dead body to Patti civil hospital for a postmortem and decided to carry out the cremation themselves. Confronted by the village council members, the SHO admitted that Gurdev had been killed inadvertently and that it was a mistake. However, the newspapers reported the incident, based on information given by the police, as an encounter declaring Gurdev Singh to be a militant. The reports quoted the SHO of Harike police station as claiming that Gurdev Singh was guiding three armed terrorists across a barrier set up by the security forces when the encounter took place. The three terrorists managed to escape, but their guide Gurdev Singh was caught and killed in the exchange of fire. According to the newspaper reports, the police also claimed to have found a Chinese-made AK-47 assault rifle and cartridges near Gurdev Singh’s body.

A leading Punjabi newspaper Ajit published a long article on 17 August 1989, questioning the police claims and referring to popular resentment in the area for killing an innocent man and then insulting his memory by concocting the story about the encounter. There was no official reaction to the story and the family could not dare to legally challenge the police highhandedness. ')"

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