Former Punjab chief minister Beant Singh’s assassin Jagtar Singh alias Tara has been arrested from Thailand by the Thai Police. They were acting on a tip off from the Punjab Police, news reports said this morning. Tara, the Khalistani militant, will shortly be extradited to India and handed over to the Punjab police, The Hindu reported. The top strategist of Babbar Khalsa International, convicted for his involvement in the assassination of Punjab Chief Minister Beant Singh, was among the four persons who escaped from the high-security Burail Jail in Chandigarh by digging a tunnel in 2004. According to this report in The Hindustan Times , the police conducted a secret operation in tandem with the Thai authorities. [caption id=“attachment_2032043” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Members of All India Anti Terrorist Front pay tribute to former chief minister of Punjab Beant Singh in Amritsar. AFP/File photo[/caption] “The joint operation led to the arrest of the self-styled chief of the Khalistan Tiger Force (KTF) from the house of one Khalat Bari, who had been sheltering Tara at the behest of Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI),” government sources told the daily. Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Syed Akbaruddin also made a statement on Twitter, saying those committing heinous crimes in India will be pursued, irrespective of where they were. Tara, a self styled chief of Khalistan Tiger Force, along with three others had escaped from Burail Jail in Chandigarh in a sensational tunnel escape in 2004. While two of the escaped convicts had been arrested, two others were on the run including Tara. Thailand’s popular island resort of Pukhet was put on high alert in October last year after it was announced that Beant Singh’s killer, who is on the run might be trying to enter the country, a media report in Phuket Gazette said . “I received an alert last night from officials who are hunting Indian national Jagtar Singh Hawara, and forwarded it to officers at my base,” Deputy Secretary General Jatuporn Klampasut of the Internal Security Operations Command (ISOC) Region 4 told the Phuket Gazette. Beant Singh was killed by a bomb blast outside the Punjab and Haryana secretariat on 31 August, 1995.