Punjab: High Court notice on plea to probe 6,733 ‘encounter killings’

Chandigarh, February 7

The Punjab and Haryana High Court today issued a notice of motion to the state on a petition filed in public interest seeking a SIT/CBI probe and ‘wider investigation’ into approximately 6,733 ‘encounter killings, custodial deaths and illegal cremations of bodies” from 1984 to 1995 on the pattern of Manipur petition pending in the Supreme Court.

The petition, placed before the Bench of Acting Chief Justice GS Sandhawalia and Justice Lapita Banerji, was filed in 2019 by Punjab Documentation and Advocacy Project (PDAP) and other petitioners through senior counsel Rajvinder Singh Bains.

The petitioner submitted that the Punjab Police and the security forces abducted the victims, killed them, burnt their bodies as being ‘unclaimed and unidentified in secret and documented cremations and by other means, including throwing the bodies into rivers and canals’.

The petitioner added that the persons extra-judicially executed were cremated without informing their kin. “The petition identifies many of these victims through the FIRs and cremation records,” the petitioner submitted while praying for an ndependent and effective investigation into these killings, besides ‘a diligent prosecution of those involved in the murders and the subsequent cover-ups’.

Bains also prayed for directing the setting up of an appropriate committee headed by a retired Supreme Court or high court judge to conduct the inquiry. Directions were also sought for compensating the victims’ families.

“In many cases the MCs have refused to issue death certificates to the families as they have not been able to prove the deaths of their kin in absence of the body. The absence of death certificates means that widows are denied widow pension. The children of the disappeared are not given subsidies in education otherwise available to other orphans,” it was added.