MEERUT/BIJNOR: It took UP police five months to realise that one of its constables who had gone missing following a month-long leave in November last year was, in fact, a convict in the infamous 1987 Hashimpura massacre serving a life sentence. Kanwar Pal Singh , a 55-year-old constable posted at Bijnor's Badhapur police station, was finally terminated last Friday following a departmental inquiry.

On November 15, when Singh proceeded on a month-long leave, his colleagues in Bijnor had asked him to come back with sweets from his hometown in Shamli.

Nobody seemed to have known that Singh, a former UP Provincial Armed Constabulary personnel, had been convicted by the Delhi high court on October 31, 2018, along with 15 others of shooting dead 42 Muslim men in Meerut 's Hashimpura area in the night of May 22, 1987 and sentenced to imprisonment for the remainder of their natural lives. The men had been shot and thrown into an irrigation canal in Meerut.

Reversing a trial court's verdict which had acquitted the 19 PAC jawans (three of them died during the 31-year-long trial), the HC directed the convicts to surrender on or before November 22, 2018, which is exactly a week before Singh went on leave..

In its verdict, a bench of Justices S Muralidhar and Vinod Goel said Hashimpura massacre was a case of "targeted killings of persons belonging to one minority community".

Three and a half month after Constable Singh failed to join duty, Bijnor police, completely unaware of his conviction, suspended him for dereliction of duty on April 1, 2019.

A departmental inquiry was set up to dig into his whereabouts.

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Bijnor superintendent of police (rural) Vishwajeet Srivastava said, "Constable Kanwar Pal Singh was posted here at Badhapur police station. A resident of Kirori village of Shamli, Singh went on a month-long leave on November 15 last year. When he failed to join back after his leave ended, the then SP had suspended him for dereliction of duty. An inquiry headed by a circle officer was set up to know his whereabouts."

"The inquiry report revealed that during his service period, he was booked along with 15 others in the 1987 Hashimpura massacre case , in which 42 people were killed. Awarded life imprisonment by the Delhi high court, Singh surrendered himself before a judge in Tis Hazari court and is currently lodged in Tihar jail ," the SP (rural) said.

Srivastava said, "After receiving the inquiry report, Bijnor superintendent of police Sanjeev Tyagi terminated him last week."

According to those involved with the trial, successive state governments in order to shield the PAC personnel, withheld a crucial piece of evidence from courts. A general diary, which had the names of all the jawans who had gone for riot duty, ahead of the Hashimpura massacre in 1987, later helped the court identify the accused.

