Under Sl. No. 113/346, the list identifies the 12 March 1991 cremation of Jagtar Singh alias Dhola, s/o Mohan Singh, r/o Rasoolpur, carried out by SHO Surinder Singh of Valtoha police station under FIR No. 21/91. The postmortem report is marked as KS 23/91 and the cause of death is mentioned as “police encounter”.

The Committee has the following information through its Incident-Report Form No. CCDP/01549. The main informant is the victim’s brother Balkar Singh.

Twenty-two year old Jagtar Singh, s/o Mohan Singh and Achhar Kaur, was a young farmer from village Rasoolpur, post office Bhangala under Valtoha police station in Patti subdivision of Amritsar district. Jagtar was married, but his widow has since remarried and does not wish to reveal her name.

Jagtar was born in a family of baptized Sikhs with five brothers who had been closely involved with the political agitation, launched by the Akali Dal, for a radical adjustment of the Center-State relationship. This agitation led to the June 1984 army assault on the Golden Temple. Jagtar’s family members sympathized with the militant objective to establish a sovereign Sikh State and had been interacting with its proponents. In September 1988, the police arrested and killed Jagtar’s elder brother Jagir Singh, along with Shinda Singh of Sur Singh Wala village, in an encounter staged at village Poonia and, thereafter, continued to view all others members of the family with suspicion and distrust. As their house was located at the fringes of the village next to their farmland, the police suspected that militants took shelter with them. With these suspicions, the police continued to raid their house frequently, arresting various family members and tortuting them in illegal custody. The police had also tortured Jagtar several times and implicated him in criminal cases under TADA. Police persecution did not cease even after he came out of jail. The police did not spare female family members, and instead illegally detained and tortured them for long periods of time. The family was prohibited from cultivating their land. The police confiscated all of their household belongings. The farm animals were let loose and all villagers were warned through a public announcement over a loudspeaker not to provide any assistance to the family. In these circumstances, while most relatives left the village, Jagtar decided to join the armed underground.

On 11 March 1991, Jagtar was arrested, apparently on a tip off, from a farmhouse in his village by a police force led by DSP Sukhdev Singh Brar and SHO Surinder Singh of Valtoha police station. Immediately after his arrest, the police first shot him in his legs and then tortured him in the same house for several hours. Then they dragged him away to an isolated spot in the village and killed him in a staged encounter. The police brought his dead body back into the village for people to look t it. They forced his mother to identify her son’s dead body. The police then took the dead body away and did not allow any member of the family to attend the cremation. ')"

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