A special court here has directed the Delhi Police Commissioner to initiate a detailed inquiry against a Delhi Police officer after a woman alleged that while on deputation to the Narcotics Control Bureau as its malkhana in-charge he falsely implicated her in an NDPS case after she objected to him taking sexual favours from her without remunerating her.
The woman told Special Judge Anu Grover Baliga that she had spent seven years in judicial custody from 2001 to 2007 in another narcotics case but a court had acquitted her. After coming out of jail, she took to working as a call girl after failing to get any other job. She alleged that the NCB officer was among several policemen who visited her but this man refused to pay her for services and when she objected, he allegedly threatened to implicate her by planting drugs on her.
The prosecution had alleged that in 2010 the NCB received a tip-off that the woman was to deliver a parcel containing narcotics at a courier service at Munirka where they caught her red-handed. The woman told the court that she had earlier refrained from confiding to her lawyer about her complete version of events because she was embarrassed about revealing the profession she was involved in.
While acquitting the woman, the Judge found six glaring lacunae in the NCB case. Among them the most disturbing were that though the clerk at the courier office was witness to the arrest-drama he was not asked to be present when the parcel containing 10 polythene bags of heroin were taken out from it. Further, these eight bags were not produced in court during the trial. The NCB officers who appeared as witnesses contradicted each other on material points and some of them were not even listed as witnesses by the prosecution. Even the sequence of the woman’s arrest was contradicted by the courier office clerk. Besides, two of the public witnesses were used by the NCB in four-five other cases in which those courts did not find them credible or trustworthy.
The court also sought the help of a handwriting expert to analyse if the handwriting on some of the courier company documents that were seized actually belonged to the accused malkhana-in-charge. The court said if the handwriting matched this would mean that the investigating officers in the case colluded with the malkhana-in-charge to falsely implicate the woman.
The court also asked the Zonal Director of the NCB to cooperate with the inquiry and asked for a status report from the Delhi Police Commissioner in two weeks.
On the prosecution contention that the woman should not be believed because of her antecedents, the Judge said: “This court is of the considered opinion that merely because the accused was forced due to circumstances to work as a call girl, cannot be a ground to brush aside her allegations, more so when she has stepped into the witness box and has withstood the test of cross-examination. As regards the earlier NDPS case, it is matter of record that the accused has been acquitted in the said case and therefore it would be against the cannons of justice if the factum of the registration of the earlier case against her is still held against her. In the present case, after very carefully perusing the entire material before it, this court is of the considered opinion that the allegations raised by the accused against the officer cannot be brushed aside so lightly and that the false implication of the accused in the present case by the investigating agency, cannot be ruled out.”
