CBI charges I-G for fake encounter

BY ASIT JOLLY

Chandigarh

July 4: The Central Bureau of Investigation has charged a senior Punjab police officer with disbursing extra-legal justice in ordering the abduction and possibly the elimination of an IAS officer’s son on suspicion of the latter’s involvement with Khalistani terrorists.

The CBI’s counsel informed the Punjab and Haryana high court on Friday that the director, Vigilance Bureau, inspector-general Sumedh Singh Saini, and three other policemen, including a retired DSP and two inspectors, have been charged with abducting former IAS officer Darshan Singh Multani’s son, Balwant Multani with the intention to kill him 17 years ago in December 1991. All the four officers, the court was informed, have been named in an FIR registered on Wednesday.

Balwant was suspected of having helped the Khalistan Liberation Force with the August 1991 bomb attack in which Mr Saini, then senior superintendent of police at Chandigarh, was wounded and three in his security detail were killed. He disappeared after the police him picked up for questioning from his father’s Mohali home.

Arguably one of the most feared police officers in the state, Mr Saini is currently leading the Parkash Singh Badal government’s campaign targeting former chief minister Amarinder Singh and his associates. The CBI’s charges against him have come as certain embarrassment for the chief minister.

Notably, the agency had begun investigating Balwant Multani’s disappearance on directions of the high court following his father Darshan Singh Multani’s petition in September 2007. In light of the father’s apprehensions that Balwant may have been eliminated by the police, the court had directed the CBI to find out whether there had been a fake encounter.

In its FIR, which was placed before the court on Friday, the CBI has said that prima facie the circumstances indicate "criminal conspiracy, abduction, illegal confinement, causing hurt to extort confession and the fabrication of false evidence". The agency’s preliminary inquiry suggests that Balwant Multani (28), who was then a junior engineer with Chandigarh’s Tourism and Industrial Development Corporation, was picked up and tortured for days in police custody here. He was subsequently moved to Qadian (Gurdaspur) from where he was shown to have escaped from the lockup on December 18, 1991.

But the victim’s father insists that the police "concocted" the story of his escape.