A Convicted Killer Cop Vanished For Three Years. Nobody Checked
Editor-in-Chief of indiacommentary.com. Current Affairs analyst and political commentator. Author of Cyber Scams in India, Digital Arrest, The Money Trap and The Human Hack
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By Sunil Garodia
First publised on 2026-07-10 07:51:03
About the Author
Editor-in-Chief of indiacommentary.com. Current Affairs analyst and political commentator. Author of Cyber Scams in India, Digital Arrest, The Money Trap and The Human Hack
View all posts by this Author
Jaspal Singh, former Punjab Police DSP and a life convict in the 1995 abduction and murder of human rights activist Jaswant Singh Khalra, was released on bail in May 2023. He has not been traced since. The address he gave the court, a village in Hoshiarpur district, has no record of him ever living there. Nobody discovered this for three years. It took a controversy over a biopic on his victim to force anyone to look.
That is the real story here. Not that a convicted man may be absconding. That the system meant to catch this had nothing in place to catch it.
The system had no trigger, only an accident
Nabha Open Jail ordered the address verification only after "Satluj," the film on Khalra, was pulled from Zee5 and became a talking point. Investigators then found the Manjhi address in Hoshiarpur does not exist for Jaspal Singh. The village sarpanch said no one by that name had ever lived there. Local police say they never received a request to verify the address before his release.
Read that again. A man convicted of abducting and murdering a human rights defender was let out on a bail bond of Rs 1 lakh, on an address nobody checked, and the system did not notice for three years. The only reason it noticed now is a streaming controversy over a film pulled from Zee5, not any procedure designed to catch exactly this.
The excuse being offered is the problem, not the defence
Jaspal's advocate has argued that address verification is required only if there is a specific court order for it. Hoshiarpur's DSP confirms this: parolees must report weekly to their local station, but bail conditions apply only if the court specifically imposes them. In most cases, it does not.
This is not a loophole exploited by one clever advocate. It is standard practice. Courts release convicted persons, sometimes convicted of the gravest crimes, on the strength of an address that nobody is obligated to verify unless a judge remembers to say so. There is no default. There is no baseline. Verification depends on judicial habit, not judicial law.
Jaspal Singh is not an isolated case, he is a visible one
He was found out because his case intersected with a film controversy. Most convicts on bail do not have that kind of visibility. If a former DSP convicted in a high-profile case can slip off the map for three years, the honest question is how many others, with no film to expose them, are equally untraceable right now.
Nobody is currently required to answer that question, because nobody is required to routinely check.
What needs to change, concretely
First, address verification before release on bail for convicted persons must be made a standard, non-discretionary step, not something contingent on a judge remembering to order it. This is a process fix, not new legislation. It converts a case-by-case courtesy into baseline procedure.
Second, periodic reporting to the local police station, the same reporting requirement that already exists for parolees, should extend to convicts released on bail, at minimum for those convicted of serious or violent offences. The infrastructure for this already exists in the parole system. It simply is not being applied here.
Third, for high-risk categories, such as convicts in custodial death or extrajudicial killing cases, courts should have the option of tighter monitoring, including geo-verification, as a bail condition. This should stay an option for serious cases, not a blanket surveillance regime for every bailed person.
The question for the courts
Bail is a right, not a formality to be waived without scrutiny. When courts release a convicted person on the basis of an address, that address should mean something. Right now it does not, unless a judge separately decides it should. That is not a system. That is a gap dressed up as procedure.
Jaspal Singh may resurface tomorrow with an innocent explanation. That is beside the point. The point is that the system had no way of knowing where he was for three years, and would have kept not knowing indefinitely if a film had not been pulled from a streaming platform. Courts need to close that gap before the next Jaspal Singh is a story that never gets told, because there is no controversy to force anyone to look.
