Multani disappearance case: HC defers hearing for Thursday

The Punjab and Haryana high court has deferred hearing on the plea from the former director general of police (DGP) Sumedh Singh Saini, in the disappearance of Balwant Singh Multani, a Chandigarh Industrial and Tourism Corporation (CITCO) employee, in 1991, for Thursday.

The hearing was deferred as the presiding judge was not holding the court on Tuesday.

It was on November 25; the high court had stayed trial court proceedings against the former DGP on the plea seeking quashing of the FIR and subsequent chargesheet filed by the Punjab Police.

Multani was allegedly picked up by two officers in 1991 after a terrorist attack on Saini, who then was Chandigarh senior superintendent of police (SSP), in which four policemen in his security were killed. The police later claimed that Multani escaped from the custody of the Qadian police.

Saini was booked in May 2020, almost 30 years after Multani went missing, during the regime of the Congress government in Punjab. In the chargesheet murder charges were also invoked. He secured anticipatory bail from the Supreme Court on December 3, 2020.

Meanwhile in another case involving Saini, on December 2, a Punjab Police SIT filed a chargesheet against seven persons excluding Saini. The FIR pertains to allegations of corruption registered on September 17, 2020, about fraudulent practices in execution of a real estate project. Saini was named in the FIR on August 2, 2021. The PWD XEN, Nimratdeep Singh and his father, Surinderjit Singh Jaspal, were accused initially of selling a Sector-20 house in Chandigarh to Saini, which vigilance claims was bought from proceeds of crime of the real estate project. Allegations against Saini were of forging a sale agreement with Jaspal for the house.

This was the only case in which he was arrested by the vigilance bureau on August 18, 2021, when he had gone to vigilance office in connection with some other FIR during Congress government tenure. But he had to be released at midnight on August 19 as the high court declared the arrest “illegal”.

While ordering his release, the high court bench of justice Arun Kumar Tyagi had observed that the allegations against Saini in this case are not that he received any bribe money from anyone or possessed any disproportionate assets or had any other financial transaction with the persons who were original accused except the transactions made under the rent agreement.

“In the present case the petitioner is alleged to have committed offence under Section 467 of the IPC by ante-dating agreement …which was on plain paper and not on any stamp paper,” it had recorded.

“..it is doubtful as to whether the allegations of creating a defence to attachment of the house satisfy the ingredients of Section 464 of the IPC so as to constitute the offence punishable under Section 467 of the IPC,” it had maintained.