Lost father & daughter due to false cases by Inspector Inderjit: Amritsar victim

Tribune News Service

PK Jaiswar

Amritsar, April 17

All hell broke loose when Inspector Inderjit Singh (since dismissed) arrested money exchanger Gurparkash Singh on the allegations of possessing drugs and helping drug smugglers in June 2014.

Loss of reputation aside, six-year-old daughter of Gurparkash died of the shock seeing his father in police custody and his father died while fighting the legal battle.

The three reports by the special investigation team (SIT) opened recently state that Gurparkash was falsely implicated by tainted cop Inderjit to extort money from him. Gurparkash said finally there was some justice as Inderjit had been behind bars since June 2018 and his senior Raj Jit Singh was dismissed from the service today. “Hope this prevents similar cases in future,” he said. “I lost my daughter and my family’s reputation as the false case brought with it a drug smuggler’s stigma,” said Gurparkash who ran a money exchanger shop at Landa Bazar here.

“My father died during the legal battle, which still continues to prove my innocence. Not only was I implicated in a drug case, my name was also dragged in a case of ‘hawala’ transactions,” he told The Tribune. His wife Gagandeep Kaur said, “We still feel scared and insecure when some unidentified person or the police visit our home. We have faced inexplicable struggle and harassment at the hands of the police.”

Showing a picture of her deceased daughter, tears rolled down from her eyes. “We cannot forget those dark days. My daughter Namanjot was shocked after meeting her father in the jail. Her friends told her that her father (Gurparkash) will not return from the jail for years. She went into a coma and died two months later,” she said.

Gurparkash said he was picked from a public washroom at Landa Bazar on June 24, 2014, in full public view and taken to the Tarn Taran CIA office. The cops demanded Rs 20 lakh or the transfer of his property in their names for releasing him. “Unable to meet their demand, the police planted 500 gm heroin against me four days later,” he alleged. He was allegedly named by a drug peddler who had once exchanged dollars from him in 2011.

“My daughter’s death left me shaken to the core. During her cremation, I told the media that Inderjit had demanded Rs 20 lakh from me. To avenge that, he implicated me in another case that was registered on June 6, 2014, in Tarn Taran. I was accused of hawala transactions,” he said.

“We spent around Rs 15 lakh, which my family borrowed from relatives, for fighting the legal battle. My father Prem Singh, who died in 2019, filed a writ petition in the Punjab and Haryana High Court against the Tarn Taran cops. Finding themselves in a soup, the cops pressured my father and family so much that they were forced to withdraw the petition,” Gurparkash claimed.

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