Punjab Timeline - 2008

Date

Incidents

January 4

The Delhi Police claimed to have foiled an attempt to kill Baba Pyara Singh Paniharewala, a Ropar-based religious leader, with the arrest of four alleged Babbar Khalsa International (BKI) militants, Baljeet Singh, Bikkar Singh, Kulwinderjeet Singh and Tirlochan Singh. On the hit list of the terrorists were four other prominent personalities of Punjab, the police said. Four pistols and 124 live cartridges were allegedly seized from their possession.

January 10

According to The Hindu, intelligence inputs on the movement of BKI militants have indicated that fugitive Jagtar Singh Tara who had escaped from the high-security Burail Jail in Punjab in 2004 and managed to cross over to Pakistan has moved up the ladder in the hierarchy of the outfit and is now supervising operations from there.

The Director General of Police (DGP) in Punjab, N. P. S. Aulakh, said that Pakistan's external intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), is behind the regrouping of Babbar Khalsa militant group in Punjab. Addressing a press conference in Chandigarh, he claimed the that Babbar Khalsa engineered the Ludhiana bomb blast in October 2007 and had planned the elimination of the Dera Sacha Sauda Chief Gurmit Ram Rahim Singh, Baba Bhaniarewala and certain other heads of religious sects operating in Punjab. The DGP further said that Babbar Khalsa operatives arrested by Ludhiana police have revealed that they got arms training in Pakistan. He said that the police has identified a new terrorist group in the name of the International Liberation Revolutionary Force (ILRF) working in the Malwa region and arrested all the six persons behind the formation of this outfit along with one AK 47 rifle and other weapons.

January 16

Police in Ludhiana arrested Mohammed Ali a.k.a. Alia for allegedly supplying RDX to the proscribed BKI militants in order to create disruption in Punjab.

February 4

The BKI militants arrested in connection with the blast at a cinema hall in Ludhiana on October 14, 2007, have told the investigators that they had approached Naga outfits for supply of arms and ammunition, Zee News reported. During their interrogation, the militants told the central security agencies that few Sikh youths had been tasked to kill political leaders including Punjab Chief Minister Prakash Singh Badal, his son Sukhbir, president of the All India Anti-Terrorist Front M. S. Bitta and former Punjab Director General of Police K. P. S Gill, official sources said. The militants also told the investigators that they had tried to contact NSCN insurgents for procuring of weapons, the sources said without elaborating whether the Punjab militants were able to strike a deal with NSCN militants or not.

February 15

Three Khalistan Zindabad Force (KZF) militants were sentenced to five years rigorous imprisonment by a court in the national capital New Delhi for a bomb blast in the Kailash Hotel in Paharganj area on March 13, 2000 in which three persons were wounded. The court sentenced the KZF militants, Sukhdev Singh, Satbir Singh and Purushottam Singh, after holding them guilty for entering into a conspiracy to wage war against the country.

March 6

Remnants of Sikh militants abroad are helping attempts to revive an insurgency in Punjab, Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh warned in a letter obtained on March 5, AFP reported. In a letter to the guardians of Sikhism's holiest shrine, the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the Prime Minister said die-hard separatists were receiving support from sympathisers living overseas. "The government and our agencies have credible information of efforts being made by extremist groups to revive militancy in Punjab," the premier said in the letter. "Much of this is concentrated in countries abroad like the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada and especially Pakistan, where such groups receive a great deal of encouragement from remnants of extremist groups as well as support from other hostile forces," he wrote. Singh was responding to an appeal for a review of an official "blacklist" of most-wanted insurgents who fled India at the peak of the insurgency in Punjab.

Sify.com quoting intelligence sources reports that the ISI is making serious attempts to revive Sikh militancy in India by coordinating and establishing linkages among various terrorist outfits with the Sikh extremist leaders. The ISI activities to this extent have been planned from countries like the US, Canada, Germany, UK, France, Norway and Belgium, besides Pakistan in the absence of ground support in India. The various terror groups have established nexus among themselves in terms of financial and logistical support, sharing of information and tactical planning. An intelligence input indicated that representatives of BKI, International Sikh Youth Federation/Rhode (ISYF) and Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) met in Berlin in June 2007 and decided that financial support would be extended to the LeT and logistical support to the BKI to carry out terrorist actions in India. Another input indicated that Nationalist Socialist Council of Nagaland-Isak-Muivah (NSCN-IM) had got in touch with a UK-based organisation, Parliamentarians for National Self-Determination (PNSD) for modelling their ‘position paper’ on the pattern of the ‘Sikh Position Paper’.

March 21

In a follow-up to the December 31, 2007-arrest of four Babbar Khalsa International (BKI) militants, the Delhi Police on March 20 claimed to have arrested two others of the same group from Jalandhar in Punjab. Deputy Commissioner (Special Cell) Alok Kumar said Jaswant Singh alias Kala (31) and Surender Singh alias Fauji (22) were arrested on March 19 near Sutlej bridge in Jalandhar. One .30 Star make pistol and one .22 Star make pistol with 11 live cartridges were recovered from them. While Kala hails from Muktsar, Fauji is a native of Jalandhar in Punjab, he said.