Under Sl. No. 55/145, the list identifies the 11 October 1989 cremation of Pargat Singh alias Fouji, s/o Dilip Singh, r/o Vernalli, carried out by SHO Gurjit Singh of Valtoha police station under FIR No. 99/89. The postmortem report is marked as PKS 2/89 and the cause of death is given as “police encounter”.

The Committee has the following information in the case through its Incident-Report Form No. CCDP/01529. The main informant is the victim’s father Dalip Singh.

Forty-year old Pargat Singh, s/o Dalip Singh and Mohinder Kaur, was a retired soldier who had served with the 16 Sikh Infantry Division of the Indian Army. After his retirement in 1988, he lived as a farmer in village Varnala, Chhanna Wale Raah Te, under Valtoha police station, in Patti subdivision of Amritsar district. He was married to Kulbir Kaur and had a daughter Baljit Kaur. Pargat Singh had no associations with any political party or militant group.

On 10 October 1989, a large police force led by DSP Paramdeep Singh Teja from Bhikhiwind and SHO Gurjeet Singh of Valtoha police station raided Pargat Singh’s house and carried out a search. The police force had come to his house along with a young Sikh, probably a militant, who had under torture confessed that he had been served food at Pargat Singh’s house and had also hidden his weapons there. When the search did not lead to a recovery of weapons, the police officers questioned the young Sikh in their custody about the weapons and asked him to reveal where he had hidden them. The young Sikh started crying and declared that he had lied to them to escape further torture. The police force then left, along with the person in their custody.

The same set of officers came back to Pargat Singh’s house in the afternoon of 10 October 1989, around 2 p.m., and arrested him and his cousin Bikkar Singh. Pargat Singh and Bikkar Singh were in their underclothes when the police raided the house and requested the officers to allow them to dress. The officers refused and, forcing them into separate vehicles, drove away.

That same evening, when the family members along with village elders reached Valtoha police station to make inquiries, SHO Gurjeet Singh told them that Pargat Singh had committed suicide by consuming cyanide. They were not shown his dead body but were asked to return to the police station the next morning. The next morning, the police sent the dead body for a postmortem and then took it for cremation to the cremation ground at Varnala village. The family members wanted to take the body to their house for religious rites and then take it for the cremation themselves. But the policemen kept the body in their custody and carried out the cremation themselves.

Bikkar Singh, who had been brutally tortured in the course of his detention, was released from illegal custody five days later.

Despite the SHO’s story about Pargat Singh’s suicide, the CBI’s list, which refers to the postmortem report, attributes Pargat Singh’s death to a “police encounter”.')"

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