PATIALA: B K I , activist Gurdeep Singh Sibia who surrendered to the Punjab Chief Minister at a well-publicized function at Chandigarh earlier this month admitted in an interview that he had a meeting with Beant Singh at Delhi in July too. The meeting was arranged by an intermediary, At their July meeting, he said, modalities of Surrender were settled,

Sibia said he decided to give up on learning that his colleague, Manjit Singh, who belonged to Khalistan Liberation Force, had been caught in Maharashtra. Manjit, too, was a British national and had come in tandem with him to plan supply of weapons to Punjab militants.

Sibia admitted he had met B.K.I chief Sukhdev Singh soon after he reached Punjab in March. The meeting took place on the roadside somewhere between Ambala and Rajpura. He denied he knew of the residential place of Sukhdev Singh or was anyway responsible for their deaths.

The B.K.I. activist said that “Beant Singhs men accompanied me to Chandigarh a day prior to his surrender,” When questioned whether he was brought to Chandigarh by men of the Intelligence Bureau, Sibia said it was possible, He denied he had been in police custody prior to his surrender.

The B.K.I. activist said that he entered India through Nepal, There he had reached from Philippines because he did not want to give a clue to the British intelligence about his India visit, His mission was to arrange supply of weapons from Pakistan through the Gujarat border and to reorganize the Babbar Khalsa in Punjab. In fact, Bhai Sukhdev Singh had once asked him to come to Punjab to lend a helping hand to reorganize the group. He said the militant outfit had been disorganized. Its cadres were acting without any discipline and had been working independently of the high command. The rot started when the B.K.I joined hands with the second Panthic committee and its allied organizations. There was not much of discipline in these organizations. The result was that the phenomenon invaded the B.K.I too, he said.

On one or two occasions during the interview held in the C.I.A headquarters with the permission of the Punjab police chief, the B.K.I activist sought the officer’s nod. These gestures clearly showed that Sibia was not made of the stuff a B.K.I. man could be expected.

Article extracted from this publication >> September 4, 1992