House at village Lakhna, the police surrounded the house from all sides and started firing

Under Sl. No. 74/199, the list identifies the 30 July 1990 cremation of Satnam Singh alias Satta, s/o Sewa Singh, r/o Valtoha, carried out by SHO Charan Singh of Valtoha police station under FIR No. 82/90. The postmortem report is marked as MS 9/90 and the cause of death is given as “encounter”.

The Committee has the following information in this case through its Incident-Report Form No. CCDP/01576. The main informant in the case is the victim’s cousin Baljit Singh.

Seventeen-year old Satnam Singh Satta, s/o Sewa Singh Fauji and Joginder Kaur, was a student living at Patti Lalo Ki, Valtoha in Patti subdivision of Amritsar district. His father Sewa Singh, a retired soldier of the Indian army, owned a very small plot of land that was insufficient to generate enough income to sustain the family. Sewa Singh, therefore, also worked as a guard with the local branch of the Punjab bank.

Satnam became attracted to the militant movement while he was appearing for his matriculation examination. After completing school, Satnam and one of his cousins Amarjit Singh, s/o Boota Singh, tried to join the militant underground but Amarjit was captured and killed within two weeks of his leaving home. Sewa Singh Fauji tried to convince his son to disown violence and return to a normal life. However by then, the police had found out about Satnam’s inclinations and started raiding his house to arrest him. In his absence, the police arrested other family members, particularly his father, questioning them under torture about Satnam’s whereabouts.

Early in the morning of 30 July 1990, when Satnam and one of his associates Shinder Singh, s/o Charan Singh from Kalia Sakattera, and another unidentified person were sleeping in a house at village Lakhna, the police surrounded the house from all sides and started firing. Satnam and his companion decided not to offer any resistance since that would have exposed the family that had given them shelter to danger. According to eyewitness accounts, which the family received, Satnam and Shinder consumed cyanide and died. But the police continued to fire for a long time with the intention of making it appear like a real and fierce encounter.

The next morning, newspapers reported the incident as a major encounter in which Satnam Singh and one other unidentified militant had been killed. The family was not informed about the killing and thus failed to attend the cremation.

The CBI’s identified list only shows Satnam’s cremation. Shinder Singh, s/o Charan Singh from Kalia Sakattera, was cremated as an unidentified militant as evident from Sl. No. 112/198 in the unidentified list of the CBI. He was cremated by the same SHO under the same FIR No.; his postmortem report is marked as MS-10/90.

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