Punjab and Haryana High Court orders CBI probe into woman’s ‘custodial death’

Saurabh Malik

Chandigarh, March 19

Nearly seven years after the alleged “custodial death” of a woman, the Punjab and Haryana High Court has ordered probe by CBI. The direction came as Justice Pankaj Jain asserted a special investigation team constituted under the court orders ignored vital questions necessary for fair investigation.

Taking up the matter, Justice Jain directed that the investigation would be carried out and completed by the premier investigation agency “as early as possible, preferably within three months” from receiving the order’s certified copy. Justice Jain also stayed the trial in the case registered initially for causing death by negligence on June 13, 2019, under Section 304-A of the IPC at the Dugri police station in Ludhiana district. The stay order would remain in operation till the supplementary report’s filing by CBI.

Justice Jain was hearing a petition filed by Mukul Garg for direction to CBI to re-investigate Ramandeep Kaur’s “custodial death”. The Bench was told that the petitioner and his fiancée Ramandeep Kaur were illegally picked on August 3, 2017, by the police while investigating a cheating and theft case. Ramandeep Kaur died during interrogational torture, he alleged.

Among other things, Justice Jain asserted that issue that caught the court’s attention was “hesitation cut marks” on both the wrists and recovery of knife from her undergarments, which was handed over to ASI Sukhdev Singh, but “conspicuously misplaced by him”. Justice Jain added the SIT recorded that the “lady constables” on duty had no satisfactory reply as to how and from where the knife came in her possession while in police custody and all the police officials feigned ignorance regarding the cut marks on the wrists.

“The SIT was constituted under the orders of this Court. The report suggests that the SIT fumbled somewhere. Its report is discrepant on the vital link regarding the deceased coming in possession of knife and the knife disappearing from the whole investigation after having been handed over by the doctors, who conducted postmortem, to Sukhdev Singh, the police official,” Justice Jain asserted.