Where is the pistol used in Saunders’ murder? Eight decades later, access to 160 files lying at the Punjab State Archives in Lahore has provided important leads that the pistol could be lying either at Lahore Fort, Police malkhana, Gwalmandi, Lahore, or the Punjab Police Academy at Phillaur.
File numbers 76 and 77 provide important leads to the possible present location of the entire material recovered from the revolutionaries who were facing trial in the 1929 Lahore Conspiracy Case, which included the Saunders’ murder case. The total number of exhibits produced in the court was 825.
The four broad categories included unlicensed weapons, bombs and bomb-making material, sundry chemicals, ammunition, and a few banned books. According to the files, bombs, arms, ammunition, clothes, utensils, books, photos, letters, notebooks and other sundry material of personal use were produced in the case. The seized books numbered around 300.
Going by the record of files 76 and 77, not only Bhagat Singh’s pistol, but all the weapons used by revolutionaries of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association could possibly be stored at either Lahore or Phillaur. Recently, Aparna Vaidik, an associate professor of history at a private university in Haryana, was allowed to see the records.
Bhagat Singh’s .32 bore pistol was also made case property. The pistol was bearing number 168896. “Now one thing is clear that the pistol is not lying along with the files. On the basis of information available in the Lahore files, we can locate it with some serious effort,” says Harish Jain, a Chandigarh-based publisher.
As per the records, on October 9, 1930, two days after the judgment, Malik Fateh Khan, registrar of special tribunal of the Lahore Conspiracy Case, sent a communication to Lahore’s District Magistrate that he has been ordered by the tribunal president that “all the exhibits in the Lahore Conspiracy Case deposited in the malkhana should be handed over to you”.
He also requested him to direct the District Nazir (aide of the Deputy Commissioner) to make ready a sufficiently commodious room for the reception of exhibits.
In a different communication, on October 8, 1930, even JM Ewert, who later headed the Intelligence Bureau, had written to the DIG (CID) to preserve the material as it can help in training the new recruits in how to investigate criminal cases. He said the exhibits could be procured with permission of the special tribunal registrar and kept in the Phillaur Museum.
“When Principal [of the police academy] gets them, he should give good descriptive labels to each and every exhibit, catalogued and intelligently used.”
In response, the DIG (CID) asked SP H Jenkins as to who would be the best person to handle the material. The SP suggested DSP (CID) NK Niaaz Ahmad Khan’s name. However, on October 16, 1930, the DIG ordered, “Please arrange to take over all the exhibits and have them kept meanwhile in Fort [Lahore] until we have time to go into this matter.”
Later that day, the police managed to get orders from two judges of the tribunal that all the exhibits should be handed over to Khan. Thus, Khan became custodian of each of the 825 exhibits recovered from the revolutionaries, handed over to him by the court in trust without any order of disposal. “NK Niaaz Ahmad Khan was the last link,” says Jain and adds, “Thus, the Lahore files give a clue that either the weapons are in Lahore or in Phillaur.”
