CHANDIGARH: The District and Sessions Judge last week accepted the plea of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and framed all the eight accused in the assassination of former Punjab Chief Minister Beant Singh under various Sections of the IPG, including conspiracy and murder CBI counsel S.K. Saxena and R.K. Handa alleged that the eight arrested accused had planned the assassination with their foreign based masters, Wadhawa Singh. Mahal Singh. Maninder Singh, Harjit Singh and Resham Singh residing in Pakistan, ‘UK. USA and Germany respectively. ‘Those who have been charged are Gurmeet Singh, a BPL engineer, Lakhwinder Singh and Balwant Singh Punjab Police constables, Jagtar Singh Tara, a Delhi taxi driver, Navjot Singh alias Dunno, a Ranbaxy employee, Nasib Singh, a farmer of Jhingra Kalan village, Shamsher Singh, a transporter, and Jagtar Singh Hawara, the Babbar Khalsa mastermind.
Since all the accused believed that Beant Singh was functioning against the interest of the Sikhs, they conspired to kill him and arranged RDX and other material to manufacture the bomb. An Ambassador car was purchased and got painted white to execute the plan. Dilawar Singh was made the human bomb, with the RDX strapped to his body in a cloth belt and on August 31, 1995 at 5:10 p.m. blew himself up and also succeeded in assassinating the former CM, besides killing 16 others. The judge Amar Dutt read the charges against all the accused in the ‘court who are being held in the high security Burail jail. The judge read out the Charges individually and explained the same to them in their vernacular language. All the eight accused pleaded not guilty and claimed trial.
‘The two Punjab Police constables, Lakhwinder Singh and Balwant Singh, have been charged with additional Sections as they were physically present at the scene of the crime, The other six have been charged differently as they were not physically present at the site of the crime.
Nasib Singh has also been charged under Section 5 of the Explosives Act on the ground that 13.70 Kes of RDX was recovered from his house in Thingra Kalan village on September 18, 1995.
Gurmeet Singh too has been charged under Section 5 of the Explosives Act since traces of RDX were found on the cardboard boxes and sheets of newspapers recovered from his room.
‘The judge accepted the defence counsels prayer for permitting them 10 examine the evidence and other material related to the crime along with the experts on May 12 in the office of the CBI here.
‘The sealed evidence would not be shown to the defence counsel at this juncture. The case would be taken up on May 8 when the doctors who had conducted postmortem on the dead would be examined; Amar Singh Chahal, D.S. Rajput and Ashok Chauhan represented the accused.
Article extracted from this publication >>May 8, 1996
