Agra, Sep 16 - Thakur Ram Singh, a freedom fighter who was an associate of martyr Bhagat Singh, died here Wednesday evening after a brief illness. He was 98.

A member of the Communist Party of India, Ram Singh was popularly called a hero of the Andamans cellular jail that was also known as Kala Pani during the British rule.

He was sentenced to life imprisonment and put up in the Andamans in the Dogra shooting case of Ajmer and later in the Delhi Conspiracy case in 1935. He was deported to Andamans in 1936 but repatriated in 1937 and released from Lucknow jail in 1941.

He was born in Ajmer April 11, 1911. He attended the Lahore conference in 1929 as a Congress delegate. In Agra he founded the Shahid Bhagat Singh Smarak Samiti.

Singh breathed his last at the SN Medical College.

Unmarried, he counted Communist Party members as his family.