Forensic examination of the video clip — on the basis of which JNU student leaders including Kanhaiya Kumar and Umar Khalid were charged with sedition last February — has been found to be authentic, a source in Delhi police said on Friday.
The police had sent the footage of the controversial February 9 event organised at Jawaharlal Nehru University — captured by a Hindi news channel — for forensic examination to the Central Forensic Science Laboratory. “We received the report on June 8 which established the authenticity of the footage,” said a source in the Delhi police special cell which had taken over the probe from the South District police.
On February 11, the CD containing the raw footage was received by the Delhi police from the channel concerned. The FIR, too, mentioned the footage and documents the fact that a group led by Khalid, who is currently out on bail, had allegedly raised anti-India slogans.
“When it was played, the video showed that under the leadership of Umar Khalid, the members of the gathering have been raising ‘anti-national’ slogans such as ‘Kitne Afzal maaroge, ghar ghar se Afzal niklenge’ and ‘Pakistan Zindabad’,” said the FIR about the footage which was sent to the CFSL in February.
Several controversies had surrounded the authenticity of the footage as there were allegations of it being doctored. A magisterial inquiry had in fact found that the clips aired on several channels were indeed doctored. A former employee of the channel which submitted the raw footage to the police also alleged that the aired footage was doctored.
The police, however, had from the beginning maintained that their case was based on the unedited footage and not what the channel(s) had aired.
When asked about the implications of the forensic report, the officer said the investigators now had a “firmer stand to proceed further.”
The Delhi police had sent several reminders to the CFSL while the report was awaited. In the interim period, the police had received forensic reports of four more video clips, mainly mobile clips capturing the events, from the CFSL lab in Gandhinagar, and those videos, too, were found to be genuine.
