NEW DELHI: The postmortem report of Kuldeep Singh the youth allegedly beaten to death by the officials of IGI Airport police station has confirmed injuries on his body.
Continuing with his injury SDM (Punjabi Bagh) Virendra Kumar last week recorded the statements of a number of police officials and Tihar Jail officials mainly to determine the chronology of events leading to Kuldeep death barely two days after his deportation from Germany. The postmortem was conducted in the morning under the supervision of a board of doctors set up by the SDM two of them from the Civil Hospital Rajpur Road and one from the forensic department of Maulana Azad Medical College.
Though the doctors came across a large number of new and old injuries on several parts of the body they could not give the exact cause of Kuldeep death. This however would not hamper the magistenal probe as Virendra had already directed the board that in case of their failure to determine the cause of death the viscera should be preserved for further tests.
In another related development tempers ran high in the SDMs court in the morning when aman tried to stop a public witness Ranjit Singh Dogra from submitting his statement later identified as Sher Singh the man advised Ranjit not to utter a word against the police.
Hearing the unsolicited advice a wave of anger spread among a group of taxi-drivers from South Patel Nagar who had assembled in SDMs court in support of the victim’s father Ajit Singh. But before the situation could go out of hand Sher Singh was arrested charged under section 506 of Indian Penal Code for intimidation and reminded to judicial custody Some of the taxi drivers alleged that Sher Singh had been sent by the police to browbeat the witness. But SHO of IGI police station who was also in the court room refuted the allegation. He said he did not know Sher Singh.
Chandra Prakash however said Kuldeep Singh had travelled to Germany on forged documents. When German authorities came to know about it they immediately deported him. He arrived here on Saturday by an Aeroflot flight. Immigration authorities arrested him at IGI Airport and handed him over to the police
The police booked Kuldeep under sections of the IPC for leaving the country on forged documents. Chandra Prakash added that when the police did not produce Kuldeep before a magistrate in Patiala House he did not complained of having been beaten up nor did he say any such thing to Tihar authorities.
According to Ajit Singhs and his elder son Sukhvinder Singh the police initially asked them to identify the travel agent who had arranged for Kuldeep visit to Germany. When we said we do not know the agent they demanded Rs 10,000 for Kuldeep release.
Kuldeep body was handed over to the members of his family in the afternoon. It was cremated late in the evening.
Article extracted from this publication >> June 10, 1994
