On January 27, 2025 a Special CBI Court in Chandigarh sentenced eight police personnel from Himachal Pradesh to life imprisonment in the 2017 Kotkhai custodial death case. The special CBI judge Alka Malik convicted them on January 18, 2025 for having tortured and killed an accused in their custody. The accused had been in police custody in case of gangrape and murder of a minor girl; popularly known as Gudiya rape and murder case.
Besides the then IGP Zahur Haider Zaidi, DSP Manoj Joshi, then Sub-Inspector Rajinder Singh (SHO Police Station Kotkhai), then ASI Deep Chand Sharma, Constable Ranjit Steta and Head Constables Surat Singh, Mohan Lal and Rafee Mohammad have been sent to prison for life as well. However, the ninth accused namely then SP D.W Negi has been let off in the case by the CBI Court.
Charges under which the cops have been convicted:
The accused have been convicted under Section 302 of Indian Penal Code for murder of an accused (Suraj Singh) in police custody, Section 330 for voluntarily causing hurt to extort confession, Section 348 for wrongful confinement to extract confession, Section 195 for giving false evidence, 196 for using evidence known to be false, 201 for causing disappearance of evidence and 218 for creating an incorrect record being public servants read with Section 120-B of the Indian Penal Code for conspiring the death and subsequently cooking up a false story of the death of Suraj Singh in police custody.
Key events in the Kotkhai Custodial Death Case:
In order for us to understand the events in the Kotkhai custodial death case, we must start from the very beginning. Let’s have a look at the events in chronological order:
4th July 2017: Disappearance of a minor girl (imaginary name- Gudiya) as she did not come back home from school.
6th July 2017: Dead body of minor girl found and eventually an FIR was registered against unknown persons at Police Station Kotkhai. Five accused namely Rajinder Singh @ Raju, Subhash, Suraj Singh (since deceased), Lokjan and Deepak @ Deepu were picked up by the police, but were later released.
10th July 2017: People were agitating as the culprits of Gudiya rape case were not found. Sensing the dis-satisfaction among people, the then DGP of Himachal Pradesh constituted an SIT to be headed by then IGP Zaidi to investigate the matter.
13th July 2017: SIT arrested six accused persons in the case of which five were those who were earlier questioned on 6th July and one other was Ashish.
14th July 2017: The arrested persons were produced before ACJM, Theog and were remanded to police custody till 20th July 2017.
Intervening night of 18th and 19th July 2017:
Suraj Singh (since deceased) fell unconscious after having been beaten by the police officials. He was then taken to the Hospital at about 12:35 AM, where he was declared brought dead by the attending staff. A story was then concocted by the accused police officials and an FIR was filed against another arrested person Rajinder Singh @ Raju under Section 302 of the Indian Penal Code, wherein it was alleged that Suraj Singh (since deceased) was killed by Rajinder Singh in a scuffle inside the police lockup.
19th July 2017: Investigation into Gudiya rape case as well as Kotkhai custodial death case was transferred to the CBI by the Himachal Pradesh High Court. The Sessions Judge, Shimla ordered a judicial enquiry into the custodial death of Suraj Singh and appointed ACJM, Theog as enquiry officer, who then ordered the first post-mortem examination on the dead body of the deceased.
22nd July 2017: After the transfer of investigation, CBI re-registered an FIR into the matter and began its investigation.
29th August 2017: During its investigation, CBI found certain material against the police officials and arrested them all except the then SP D.W Negi.
16th November 2017: CBI then arrested the then SP D.W Negi, who is now exonerated of the charges by the CBI Court, Chandigarh.
Transfer of Trial from Shimla to Chandigarh
In May 2019, the trial in Kotkhai custodial death case was transferred by the Supreme Court from Shimla to Chandigarh. “We order transfer of the case to a competent CBI court in Chandigarh,” said a bench of Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi, Justice Deepak Gupta and Justice Sanjiv Khanna after the Central Bureau of Investigation and the accused said they had no objection to the transfer of case. This came in wake of an application filed by the investigating agency to expedite the trial of the case. The counsel representing CBI contended that even though the chargesheet had been filed against several police officials, the trial had “not seen the light of the day.”
What did CBI say before the Court
The prosecution examined as much as 52 witnesses to prove its case beyond any reasonable doubt. Of all the witnesses, Head Constable Deepak Kumar was the star witness of the case. He was on Sentry duty on the intervening night of incident, and had deposed before the court how the arrested persons were tortured in the police custody and how after Suraj Singh’s death the accused police officials conspired to frame another arrested person for causing death of Suraj Singh.
It further went on to say that the allegations levelled against Rajinder Singh @ Raju for causing death of Suraj Singh were falsified after the post-mortem of the deceased. It was revealed in the post-mortem examination that as much as 20 injuries were there on the body of deceased, and they were collectively enough to cause death, and it further revealed the cause of death to be traumatic shock due to multiple injuries. In fact, the medical board which had conducted the second post mortem examination on the body of deceased had ruled out the possibility of injuries being caused due to scuffle with another person in police lockup. It said that the body had sustained injuries over different intervals, and had been caused by blunt/hard cylindrical object like a rod, lathi or a baton.
The investigating agency also alleged that IGP Zahur submitted a false report to the then DGP about the cause of death of Suraj Singh in police custody and that all the accused officials were in fact hand-in-glove with each other in wrongfully confining the arrested persons to extract confession out of them and threatened them to confess and in the course of such pressure, killed one of the arrested persons by torturing him to the extreme and then concocted another false story by framing another arrested person of killing Suraj Singh in a scuffle in the police custody.
Findings by the Trial Court
After having heard the investigating agency, the accused persons and examining the evidence on record, the CBI Court reached to the conclusion that eight out of nine police officials were in fact involved in the serious offence of having killed an accused in their custody, and then to shift the burden, they had conspired to frame another accused person in the murder case of Suraj Singh.
Thus, finding merit in the case of prosecution, the special CBI court convicted all but one police officials of all the charges framed against them and awarded them with life imprisonment. As to the Gudiya rape and murder case, one Anil Kumar @ Nillu was convicted by the Special CBI Court, Shimla in April 2021.
