Typically, bodies of victims were taken for post-mortem and secretly cremated as ‘unclaimed, unidentified’. In most cases, the Punjab security forces claimed that they were the bodies of captured militants that were killed while trying to escape police custody, or militants that had ambushed police convoys and were killed in the cross fire during armed exchanges (encounters). Other abductees simply disappeared without trace. Our investigations conclude that the overwhelming majority of those fatalities were the result of unarmed victims being abducted from their homes and illegally detained and killed whilst in the custody of the security forces.
According to Indian Government figures there were around 25,000 fatalities during the Punjab conflict. Human rights groups have maintained that the number is much higher. Exactly how many of these deaths were extra-judicial killings by state security forced has never been officially disclosed. When the of human rights activist Jaswant Singh Khalra uncovered evidence of thousands of secret cremations of victims of extra-judicial killings, he himself was abducted and brutally murdered by police. Several lawyers, journalists and human rights activists were also killed or disappeared at the height of the conflict.