Chandigarh: Punjab Police on Friday morning raided the residence of former state Director General of Police Sumedh Singh Saini, but could not find him there.
Sumedh Singh Saini, who is now above 60, was considered a blue-eyed boy of militancy-era police chief K.P.S. Gill, who was credited with eliminating militancy in the state.
Saini was booked in connection with the 29-year-old ‘abduction’ case of Balwant Singh Multani in May this year.
Section 302 (punishment for murder) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) has been added last week in the first information report (FIR) against Saini on the direction of a trial court in Mohali near here.
A day earlier, the Mohali court reserved orders on Saini’s bail application.
Based on the complaint, the case was registered afresh under Sections 364 (kidnapping or abduction in order to murder), 201 (causing disappearance of evidence), 344 (wrongful confinement), 330 (voluntarily causing hurt to exhort confession) and 120 (B) (criminal conspiracy) in Mohali on May 7.
The kidnapping case was related to a bomb attack on Saini by the Khalistan Liberation Force militants in 1991. At that time, he was the Senior Superintendent of Police and posted in Chandigarh. He survived with injuries, but his three security personnel were killed.
A Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) probe into Multani’s disappearance began in 2007 against Saini but he got the relief from the Supreme Court and the probe stopped.
Saini, who was removed from the top post by Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal in 2015 following incidents of sacrilege of Guru Granth Sahib and subsequent violence in the state in which the police force was accused of excesses that left two people dead, has not been sharing cordial relations with current Chief Minister Amarinder Singh.
In fact, Saini had challenged the Vigilance Bureau’s closure report in the multi-crore Ludhiana City Centre scam involving Amarinder Singh.
For quite some time, Amarinder Singh had been seeking a probe into the fake gun battles and extra-judicial killings alleged to have taken place during militancy in Punjab.
Taking cognizance of the revelations made by a former Punjab Police constable, Gurmeet Singh, alias Pinky, wherein he had alleged in 2015 that a number of people were killed without trial during militancy in Punjab, Amarinder Singh had demanded the dismissal of DGP Saini and registration of a case against him.
The Chief Minister has already rejected Saini’s allegation of political motivation in the filling of the FIR against him.
There was no question of political interference, the Chief Minister has said, asserting the law would take its course in the matter.
A police spokesperson said the case against Saini was filed on the basis of a fresh application by the victim’s brother Palwinder Singh Multani, a resident of Jalandhar.
The spokesperson said the complainant had cited the Supreme Court order of December 7, 2011 that it was “open to the applicants who had filed the petitions under Section 482 of the CrPC to take recourse to fresh proceedings, if permissible in law”.
