Twenty-nine years ago on May 23, 1997, a man in white clothes walked onto a railway track near Dera Bassi and stepped in front of the Delhi Kalka Himalayan Queen Express.

The police said the man was SSP Ajit Singh Sandhu — one of the most controversial faces of the Punjab Police.

Sandhu's name has resurfaced with the release of Diljit Dosanjh's film ‘Satluj’, which depicts the killing of human rights activist Jaswant Singh Khalra and the fake encounters allegedly carried out by Sandhu and other Punjab Police officers during those years.

Whether Sandhu actually died at Bakharpur near Dera Bassi on May 23, 1997, or his death was staged has been a question since the day it happened.

I was a young reporter then with The Indian Express who was posted in Patiala, where the Government Railway Police headquarters for Punjab was located. The case fell in the GRP’s jurisdiction. I have kept a record of most of my news reports. These were based on statements of police officials, including GRP officer Gurinder Pal Singh, government forensic examiners, a private handwriting examiner, Gopal Krishan Sharma, and other sources.

The initial news reports did not rule out murder even as the police declared it as a suicide instantly. Sandhu's mother told the police that her son had been killed. That claim was not pursued at the time.

On May 28, five days after the incident, the statement of the train driver was reported for the first time. The driver told the police he saw a man in white clothes walking on the right side of the track, moving towards the train, near Indus Valley Club in Lalru. The man suddenly jumped in front of the train and was run over.

That account, along with the identification of the body by journalists who reached the spot, formed the basis on which it was accepted that the man on the track was Ajit Singh Sandhu.

A suicide note was found in two pieces inside Sandhu's wallet. It stated in Punjabi “Zalalat di zindagi jeen nalon mar jana hi changa hai” (It is better to die than live in this shame/humiliation).

Police sources said at the time that the paper did not appear freshly written and may have been two days old, suggesting the decision had weighed on him for some days before his death.

A private handwriting expert, Gopal Krishan Sharma, examined the note against Sandhu's earlier writing samples and submitted a 10-page report concluding it was genuine. He cited the loops, the pen pressure, the slant and the distinct flow of the Punjabi letter ‘la’ in Sandhu's hand as consistent markers.

However, a government handwriting expert was not convinced and asked for more recent Punjabi writing samples. The demand exposed a gap in the investigation.

As a senior officer, Sandhu mostly dictated notes or signed documents drafted in English. The only Punjabi samples police could produce dated back to 1977 and 1978, nearly two decades before his death. One of those samples carried only the first letter of his name and could not be meaningfully matched against the full word Ajit written on the note recovered from his wallet.

Investigators at the time were struck by the manner of death. Sandhu had a service revolver and access to poison through official channels, yet he was said to have chosen to step in front of a train.

The post mortem recorded the injuries as ante-mortem, indicating he was alive when the train struck him. His body was severed through the abdomen and his left hand was torn away. His skull and scalp were cut apart, though his face remained recognisable enough for several journalists who reached the spot that day to identify him by sight. Some of those journalists have since retold that identification on television and social media as settled fact.

Facial identification and a disputed handwriting match are not the same standard of proof. One rested on memory. The other was contested by the state's own expert even as the file was closed.

The case is now being revisited alongside the retelling of Khalra's murder and the fake encounter years, with Sandhu's name linked to that of former DGP KPS Gill in public accounts of that period. The unproven claim that Sandhu did not die at all, and was instead moved abroad under a new identity with state protection, has persisted for nearly three decades without an official inquiry to test it.

The questions from 1997 remain unanswered in 2026.