NIA probes Salwinder Singh leads

At last the worm turns. Salwinder Singh, SP-level Assistant Commandant of the Punjab Police Armed Battalion, despite boasting that the investigating agencies would never get anything out of him, appears to have cracked following continuous interrogation, including lie detector tests. The National Investigation Agency, which made a point to probe Salwinder Singh, has now fanned out its investigations in Pathankot, Gurdaspur and Amritsar districts also following leads gained from the Punjab police officer's grilling. Apart from Salwinder Singh, two of his acquaintances premises have also been searched. The sturdy Punjab Police Officer gave away his official car with blue beacon light without a fight to the Pakistani-origin terrorists who stormed the Pathankot airbase on January 1, pretending to be a victim of the terrorists. He claimed the terrorists had spared his life and also that of his cook, Madan Gopal, because he had pretended to be a common man riding an SP's car. His jeweller friend, Rajesh Verma, had, however, his throat slit by the terrorists. Circmstantial and every other evidence pointed to the SP's complicity and duplicity in the Pathankot terror attack. Having got the leads, the NIA would do well to make the premises of the Services out of bounds for Salwinder Singhs.