M A I N   N E W S

Nishan Singh hard to crack: CBI
Tribune News Service

NEW DELHI, Nov 6 — Despite nearly two days of interrogation, sleuths of the Special Crime Branch of the CBI have not been able to extract much information from Nishan Singh, former gunman of Bibi Jagir Kaur, arrested in connection with the Harpreet Kaur death case.

“He (Nishan Singh) is hard to crack.... We have not been able to extract much in the last two days,” a CBI official told The Tribune.

“His interrogation is still on and he is being allowed to consult his counsel whenever he asks for,” he said adding that the mandatory medical check-up of the accused was being conducted from a government hospital.

Nishan Singh, who had been evading arrest ever since the CBI registered an FIR in the case, had surrendered on Saturday morning as per the direction of the Punjab and Haryana High Court. He had been remanded to CBI custody till November 13.

The statement of Nishan Singh, a Punjab police cop, is crucial for the CBI to tie the loose ends in the Harpreet Kaur case.

The arrest of Bibi Jagir Kaur would also depend a great deal on the statements and disclosures made by Nishan Singh, who was the Personal Security Officer of the SGPC President.

Nishan Singh is the sixth person to be arrested in the case by the CBI. The others are Dalvinder Kaur, Parmjeet Singh, Harvinder Kumar, alias Binder, Satya and Sanjeev Kumar.

Harpreet Kaur, daughter of Bibi Jagir Kaur, had died under mysterious circumstances on the April 20.

Durbar move amid bandh
Tribune News Service

JAMMU, Nov 6 — The civil secretariat and other durbar move offices reopend here to a thin attendance of employees owing to Jammu bandh here today. The call for bandh had been given by the Jammu Nationalist Front and students organisations to press for the creation of Jammu state.

Barring a few incidents of stone throwing and raising of road blocks the bandh passed off peacefully. Work in government offices and banks was affected as employees could not make it to their offices in the absence of public transport services. Various shopping centres remained closed and the passenger transport services were off the roads.

The Chief Minister, Dr Farooq Abdullah, and ministers and senior bureaucrats reached the secretariat on time. Though the attendance in the civil secretariat was thin, employees were seen opening the trunks carrying files, brought from Srinagar.

Dr Abdullah told a group of newsmen that there was no room for division of the state on communal lines. He said unity among the regions of Kashmir, Jammu and Ladakh, constituting the state, was in the interest of the nation. “Agitations or no agitation, there will be no trifurcation of the state,” he said.

In reply to a question the Chief Minister said “we have faced many challenges and we will face many more because of the belligerent mood of Pakistan.” He said “we will face all these challenges” provided “we remain united.”

He wanted Pakistan to realise that the people in the state were against Pakistan. And if Islamabad drew a lesson from this change it should stop aiding and encouraging militancy in the state. He made it clear that since Kashmir was an integral part of India there was no rationale behind the demand for holding tripartite talks.

Today’s bandh had support from constituents of the Sangh Parivar except the BJP, which is divided on the issue. The official stand of the BJP is not in favour of trifurcation, but recently the leader of the BJP State Legislature Party, Mr Shiv Charan Gupta, supported the move of Jammu state. In fact the BJP is in favour of establishing regional councils so that political and financial powers were devolved equally among the three regions of Ladakh, Jammu and Kashmir.

The Nationalist Front leader, Mr Tilak Raj Sharma, and several leaders of student organisations while thanking people of Jammu for responding to their bandh call said that the demand for trifurcation would not have been raised had the successive valley-based governments not given a raw deal to the people of Jammu region.

The Jammu Mukti Morcha chief, Prof Virender Gupta said that today’s bandh should be an eye-opener to the Chief Minister, Dr Farooq Abdullah, who was trying to thwart “our struggle” for separate statehood.

Prof Gupta said since there was vast lingual, social and cultural diversity between the regions of Kashmir and Jammu the only way to end escalating regionalism was to grant statehood to Jammu.