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27th December, 2006
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Voices For Freedom has written to the Special Rapporteur on Torture to intervene in the case of arrest of three persons falsely implicated by Punjab Police. Punjab Police Ropar arrested a British national Mr. Panjab Singh alias Mr. Parmjeet Singh Dhadi on December 23, 2006 while he was on his way back from attending a function accompanied by Mr. Jasbir Singh Rode former High Priest of Akal Takht. Two other persons Mr. Amolak Singh and Mr. Jasvinder Singh were also arrested by the Jalandhar Police. The Ropar police alleged that as nothing was found on Mr. Rode he was being released and Mr. Dhadi was handed over to the Jalandhar police as he was wanted in a case in Jalandhar. The Jalandhar police has been since torturing the arrested persons to extract confessional statements from them.
Mr. Dhadi alleged that he has been beaten by sticks, made to stand out in the open naked in the cold winter night, his legs stretched and his articles of faith removed in order to make him sign the confessional statement. His daughter who is a lawyer in UK when contacted on phone said that “my father has been tortured brutally and my mother was not allowed to meet him in the police station where she kept waiting for over five hours. My father has made a direct statement that he is being tortured and we have conveyed this to the British High Commission for intervention.”
The three above mentioned persons have been arrested under mysterious circumstances and the police story has many gaps and variations that nail the lie to the police version. The place of their arrest and the searches by the police, have not been witnessed by anyone. In fact when some journalists went to Mr. Dhadi’s village (Gakhal) and asked people if the police had made any searches in the fields of Mr. Dhadi where the police had alleged the explosives were found, not a single villager had seen any police activity around the place and one Satwant Kaur who attends to Paramjit’s land confirmed she worked all day in his fields and no police had come. Another discrepancy is initially police alleged that they had found RDX (explosives) in Paramjit’s car and then later changed their statement saying they found it at his village in Gakhal at 2:30pm next to his well under a ‘cop’, a hay storage. The police now in its efforts to cover up their tracks had dug up the land around Mr. Dhadi’s well in order to prove the RDX was in fact found there but various journalists who had visited village Gakhal a day after the arrest had already mentioned that no land had been dug up around the area.
One of the arrested person is a British national and he has been arrested earlier also on suspicion but was exonerated by the courts as nothing incriminating was found on him. This time the police has fabricated the bogey of “terrorism” and alleged that a large cache of arms and explosives were found on the farm of Mr. Dhadi.
The case has many loopholes as has been pointed out by the defense lawyer as well as the procedure adopted in their arrest reveals the nefarious designs of the administration still bent upon labeling Sikhs as terrorists and torturing them.
Mr. Amar Singh Chahal, President Lawyers for Human Rights International has written to Mr. Michael Arthur KCMG, the British High Commissioner in India to intervene in the case.
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