New Delhi: The Allahabad high court on Thursday, December 15, convicted 43 police officers for culpable homicide in a case relating to the extrajudicial killing of 10 Sikhs in Uttar Pradesh’s Pilibhit in 1991. However, the court set aside the lower court’s ruling convicting the policemen of murder.According to The Hindu, the high court sentenced the policemen to seven years’ rigorous imprisonment with a fine of Rs 10,000. The court set aside the murder conviction because the police officers’ case would be covered by Exception 3 to Section 300 of the IPC, which provides that culpable homicide is not murder if the offender, being a public servant or aiding a public servant, causes death by an act which he thinks is ‘lawful’, according to a LiveLaw report.The high court said there was “no ill-will between the accused and those killed. The accused were public servants and their object was the advancement of public justice”.The case relates to the killing of ten Sikhs in Pilibhit on the intervening night of July 12-13, 1991. Eleven men were picked up from a bus in which the police believed were some “hardcore terrorists” affiliated to the Khalistan Liberation Front. Ten Sikhs were picked up by the police and in three separate “encounters”, while the body of one of the men was never recovered.While the prosecution said that the police killed them in a “fake encounter”, the policemen – then 47 in number – claimed that they killed the Sikhs in self-defence.The trial court concluded in April 2016 that the police officers committed a criminal conspiracy by abducting the ten Sikh youths and killed them in a fake encounter. They also created a paper trail to convert the killings of these Sikhs into encounters, the court held, according to LiveLaw.The trial court convicted them under Sections 120-B (punishment of criminal conspiracy), 302 (Punishment for murder), 364 and 365 (kidnapping), 218 (public servant framing incorrect record to save person from punishment), 117 (abetting commission of offence by the public or more than 10 persons) of the Indian Penal Code.The policemen challenged their conviction before the high court. During the pendency of appeals, four of them died.High court’s observationsAt the outset of the hearing, the high court said that the appellants had admitted that they killed 10 Sikh ‘terrorists’ in self-defence. However, it said that the medical evidence did not support the self-defence theory of the appellants.“The case of the appellants is that they killed 10 terrorist persons as they eliminated them in self-defence because when they saw the terrorists come out from the forest area, then, they challenged them and all of a sudden, the terrorists opened fire. In retaliation and in self-defence, the appellants had opened fire and in that way, 10 terrorist persons were killed in the firing…The claim of the appellants that they killed 10 terrorist persons in self-defence does not corroborate with the medical evidence,” it said.According to The Hindu, the high court said that while the prosecution demonstrated that four to six of the deceased were involved in various terrorist activities in Punjab and were also operating in the Tarai region of Pilibhit district, there were no such records for the remaining. The police officers could only argume that the others who were killed in the “encounter” were companions of the four deceased. The court said this is “not at all acceptable as act of the appellants cannot be justified to kill innocent persons along with some terrorist taking them to be also terrorists”, according to the newspaper.“It is not the duty of the police officers to kill the accused merely because he/she is a dreaded criminal. Undoubtedly, the police have to arrest the accused and put them up for a trial,” the bench of Justice Ramesh Sinha and Justice Saroj Yadav said.The Pilibhit district police had initially conducted investigated the fake encounter and submitted a closure report. However, on the direction of the Supreme Court, the investigation was handed over to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). The CBI had chargesheeted a total of 57 policemen in the case. Fourteen of them died during the course of the trial.