Under Sl. No. 91/263, the list identifies the 04 December 1990 cremation of Gopal Singh, s/o Bagh Singh, r/o Maneke village carried out by SHO Jarnail Singh of Valtoha police station under FIR No. 128/90. The postmortem report is marked as KS 26/90 and the cause of death is given as “police encounter”.

The Committee has the following information in this case through its Incident-Report Form No. CCDP/01685. The main informant is the victim’s widow Harbans Kaur.

Sixty-two year old Gopal Singh, son of Bhag Singh and Gulab Kaur, was a farmer resident of Mane Ke village under Valtoha police station in Patti subdivision of Amritsar district. Married to Harbans Kaur, he was the father of a son Channan Singh and two daughters. Gopal Singh did not have any criminal or political background and had never been arrested or interrogated.

Early in the morning of 4 December 1990, around 7 a.m., Gopal Singh was feeding his cattle at the barn of his fields when he was hit by bullets fired by a group of policemen apparently chasing some militants. Gopal Singh died on the spot. A newspaper report that appeared the next day said that a militant had been killed in an encounter at village Mane Ke.

A larger number of village residents, including the members of the village council, went to Valtoha police station to tell the officers that the person killed by them was not a terrorist but an innocent farmer of the village. The officers admitted that it was an inadvertent killing, handed the body over to them for its cremation at the village and promised to take action against the responsible. They, however, later changed their position to announce that Gopal had been killed by fleeing militants and later paid some compensation to the family members. The police also told the family not to reveal how Gopal Singh had actually been killed so that they may continue to receive the benefits to which the victims of militant violence are entitled.

Once again, it is not clear why and how Gopal Singh’s cremation is included in the CBI’s list of identified cremations carried out by the police. The body had been burned by the family members at the village.')"

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