Under Sl. No. 117/385, the list identifies the 12 April 1991 cremation of Mukhtiar Singh, s/o Balwant Singh, r/o Deo, carried out by Johar Singh of Tarn Taran’s Sadar police station under FIR No. 35/91. The postmortem report is marked as 16/91 and the cause of death is given as “police encounter”.

The Committee has the following information through its Incident-Report Form No. CCDP/01520. The main informant is the victim’s mother Jagir Kaur.

Twenty-year old Mukhtiar Singh, son of Balwant Singh and Jagir Kaur, was a farmer and milk-vendor from village Deoo under Sadar police station of Tarn Taran. His father had died when he was very young. One of his two brothers was a policeman and the eldest, Jodh Singh, was a soldier with the Indian army who had joined the local branch of the Punjab national bank as a security guard after retirement. Mukhtiar Singh, therefore, gave up school to look after his family farm and also started selling milk to supplement his income.

In 1987, Tarn Taran police arrested him on the suspicion of maintaining links with Sikh militants in his area. They interrogated him under torture and then implicated him in a case under TADA. But the case was so flimsy that the court released him on bail after a few months. Mukhtiar attended the court cases regularly and was acquitted in all of them. He was not arrested again.

In the night of 11 April 1991, Mukhtiar Singh was watering his fields when the Sadar police supported by soldiers of the Indian army cordoned off the area for a combing operation. The next morning, some villagers discovered his dead body, along with the body of another unidentified young Sikh, and informed his family members. Later, the village council complained to the army and the police authorities that they had killed an innocent man of the village who was watering his fields. The officers expressed regret, but took no action. The Tarn Taran police performed the cremation, but allowed the family members to attend.

The cremation of the unidentified dead body is recorded in the CBI’s 3rd list, under Sl. No. 243/386. ')"

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