HC directs telecom units to give call details to police

The Madras High Court Bench here on Monday directed telecom companies Vodafone, Airtel, Aircel and Reliance to provide phone call details sought by Superintendent of Police Deshmukh Shekar Sanjay, specially appointed by the court to probe a child missing case, within a week or face the music.

Passing interim orders on a habeas corpus petition filed by the mother of a 14-year-old boy, Sarath Kannan of Sivaganga, missing since 2014, a Division Bench of Justices S. Nagamuthu and M.V. Muralidaran warned that the officials of the four telecom companies would be summoned to the court if they failed to provide the call details. The order was passed after Mr. Sanjay, a 2012-batch IPS officer attached to Prohibition and Enforcement Wing here, appeared before the court and said he was yet to receive the call details from the telecommunication companies, and a DNA report from the Director of Forensic Sciences Laboratory, Chennai.

The judges issued a direction to the Director of Forensic Sciences Laboratory also to issue the report within a week after comparing the DNA of the body of a 15-year-old boy found within Mettur Dam police station limits with that of the parents of the Sivaganga boy.

The Division Bench had appointed Mr. Sanjay as a special officer to probe the case on October 21 after being dissatisfied with the investigation done by Sivaganga police, who could not achieve a breakthrough despite the court ordering a probe by a team led by a local Deputy Superintendent of Police.

When the case came up for hearing on Monday, Mr. Justice Nagamuthu asked the special officer to come up with suggestions on how to create an effective system of sharing of information between police stations across the State with respect to spotting of unidentified bodies so that many cases could be solved at the earliest.

“At one hand, we see the Inspector of one police station unable to solve a boy missing case for years together and on the other, the Inspector of another police station is unable to fix the identity of a body found within his jurisdictional limits. Some mechanism must be created to share the information among police personnel,” the judge said, and adjourned the hearing till November 18.