Human Rights Watch says nearly 600 people have died between 2010 and 2015, but not one officer has been convicted

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

Indian police are torturing suspects – including using sexual abuse, forms of waterboarding and beatings with a “truth-seeking belt” – a Human Rights Watch investigation has claimed.

A report released by the rights group on Monday says more than 590 suspects died in police custody between 2010 and 2015, and though mistreatment was alleged in many cases, no police officers have been convicted in that time.

Rules intended to curb the number of deaths in custody, such as bringing a suspect before a magistrate within 24 hours of their arrest, were routinely ignored, it says.

In one case highlighted in the report, police said a man named Shyamu Singh killed himself in custody in April 2012. But his brother, who was also arrested, told investigators the pair were held down by four officers while another “poured water down my nose continuously”.

“Once they stopped on me, they started on Shyamu,” he said. “Shyamu fell unconscious. So they started worrying and talking among themselves that he is going to die. One of the men got a little packet and put the contents in Shyamu’s mouth.”

Police told Singh’s family that he had died by consuming poison. An internal investigation cleared police of any involvement in his death, but an initial inquiry by state authorities concluded that seven police officers had tortured and poisoned the 35-year-old to death. Nonetheless, all seven were exonerated in the final report.

In another case, one of 17 featured in the report, a police head constable admitted that a suspect in a counterfeiting investigation had been beaten with a satyashodhak patta, or “truth-seeking belt”.

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“Since he was a hardcore criminal, he refused to give any information on the source of those fake currency notes seized from him. But it was essential to get that information from him,” Atmaram Gurav is quoted as saying in the report.

“He was so weak after the beating that when he got up to drink water, he was dizzy with pain and collapsed against the window, breaking his lower jaw.”

Procedures to investigate deaths in custody are regularly flouted, the report says. Less than a third of the 97 deaths in 2015 led to a judicial inquiry, and in 26 cases no autopsy was conducted.

The New York-based rights group says there are police oversight bodies to investigate such cases, but they have “largely failed” in their role.

More than 430 cases of deaths in police custody were reported to India’s National Human Rights Commission between April 2012 and June 2015. The NHRC recommended more than a total of 22m rupees (£260,000) compensation in the cases, but no prosecutions.

“Police in India will learn that beating suspects to confess is unacceptable only after officers are prosecuted for torture,” said Meenakshi Ganguly, Human Rights Watch’s south Asia director.

The report makes several recommendations including that India set up a witness protection programme to encourage victims of police violence to come forward without fear of retribution.