Science hasn’t yet developed so much to enable a dead person to talk through a mobile phone, observed the Madhya Pradesh High Court recently while directing the state DGP to conduct a departmental inquiry against an Investigating Officer (IO) and other police personnel for allegedly planting witnesses in a 2021 murder case.
“What makes them (police) to implant false witnesses to take away life and liberty of innocent citizens,” the court asked the police as it overturned the conviction of a father-son duo in the murder case. It ordered the inquiry report to be furnished within 30 days.
Terming the probe “dishonest”, the HC bench, comprising Justice Vivek Agarwal and Justice Avanindra Kumar Singh, pulled up the police for resorting to “lies to just complete investigation and file chargesheet”.
Going through the post-mortem report of the victim, Rajendra, who went missing in September 2021, the court found that a witness’s claim of Rajendra being in constant touch with the daughter of the accused was false as he was dead at the time. “Science has yet not so developed to enable a deceased person to connect through mobile phone and talk to daughter of the accused person,” said the court.
“This is another lacuna which reveals how dishonest is the status of investigation in the State of Madhya Pradesh and all the prosecution witnesses, including police officials, resort to lies to just complete investigation and file chargesheet rather than carry out honest, transparent and independent investigation.”
A crucial development in the case emerged when one of the key eyewitnesses admitted during cross-examination that he was informed about the case by police.
The court noted, “He was planted by the police for which we shall be ordering a separate inquiry against the IO to be conducted by the senior police official for making false accusations and planting false witnesses. The prosecution did not re-examine this witness to extract any contradiction on the last statement that he came to know about the incident when police brought him from Kerala. Thus, it is a gross failure on the part of the concerned public prosecutor who conducted the trial.”
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Rajendra went missing on September 20, 2021 and his mutilated body was found in a forested area a few days later. The police arrested the two accused — Nain Singh Dhruve and his son Sandeep Kumar Dhurve — for allegedly killing Rajendra on suspicion of him being in a relationship with Nain Singh’s daughter.
A trial court in Mandla in 2023 convicted the father-son duo and sentenced them to life imprisonment. They challenged the verdict in the High Court and submitted that an eyewitness was planted by the police in the case, and that no complete chain of circumstances was proven during the trial.
