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Chahal’s check-up at AIIMS ordered

Special Correspondent

To ascertain whether he was administered electric shocks

Photo: Akhilesh Kumar

B.I.S. Chahal being brought to the Punjab and Haryana High Court in Chandigarh on Tuesday.

CHANDIGARH: The Punjab and Haryana High Court has ordered a medical examination of B.I.S. Chahal, Media Adviser to former Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh, to ascertain whether he was administered electric shocks while in the custody of the police after his arrest in June.

The Punjab Government, Punjab Police and the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi were directed to constitute a Board of Doctors which would examine Mr. Chahal. The report is to be submitted to the High Court within two weeks, while hearing of the case was adjourned till August 6.

The direction was handed down on Tuesday by Justice Uma Nath Singh while hearing a petition filed by Mr. Chahal seeking bail in a case of attempt to murder, land grab and rioting registered against him and five of his relatives in Ludhiana. While Mr. Chahal, who has five cases against him, has been granted bail in three, he has been remanded to judicial custody in another case of allegedly amassing assets disproportionate to his known sources of income.

While taking up Mr. Chahal’s application on Monday, the Court had directed the police to produce him in person. However, the proceedings on Tuesday were disrupted as lawyers owing allegiance to the Punjab and Haryana High Court Bar Association boycotted Mr. Justice Singh’s court. They were protesting against an order passed on Monday in another matter where the Court directed the CBI that a lawyer be taken into custody and sent to the Mental Hospital in Agra for treatment.

In the afternoon, without any support of his counsel, Mr. Chahal, who often broke down in the Court, pleaded that he had been tortured and humiliated in the most barbaric fashion. When he sought a private audience in the chamber as it was not possible for him to narrate in an open courtroom “everything” he had gone through when he was in police custody, the Judge asked him to submit the sequence of events in writing.

When Mr. Chahal appealed for an investigation by a central agency, especially the CBI, as he was being involved in cases based on concocted evidence, the Court asked for his consent to shift the cases out of Punjab, to the Union Territory of Chandigarh or Haryana.

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