NEW Delhi: The forensic examination of raw video footage of the controversial February 9 JNU event, on which a sedition case was registered against JNUSU president Kanhaiya Kumar and two others, has been found to be “authentic” by the CBI forensic lab, police claimed on Saturday.
The raw footage of the event, obtained from a Hindi news channel, was sent to the CBI forensic lab for examination along with camera, memory card, a CD containing the clip, wires and other equipment, they said.
“The CBI lab sent a report to Delhi Police’s Special Cell on June 8 saying the raw footage was authentic,” a police source said. Special Commissioner of Police (Special Cell) Arvind Deep confirmed the receipt of report but did not divulge the details. He said that the case is under investigation and it will be too early to comment on the case.
Earlier, Delhi Police had sent four video clips of the event to Gandhinagar-based Central Forensic Science Laboratory (CFSL) which in its report, in May, had said that they were genuine.
However, a Delhi government-ordered probe, into a set of seven video clippings of the controversial event sent to the Hyderabad-based Truth Labs, had found two clips to be manipulated while others as genuine.
Police, however, maintained that the FIR into the matter was registered on the basis of the raw video footage, obtained from a news channel on a CD, and not on the clippings which were aired on TV channels.
In the FIR, police had claimed that in the video a group of students, led by JNU student Umar Khalid, could be seen raising anti-India slogans. A senior police official said after the confirmation of authenticity of the footage, they could proceed further against the protesters who had shouted slogans.
Don’t know which clips CBI probed: Truth Labs
Reacting to the new development in the JNU sedition case, officials from Hyderabad-based Truth Labs said on Saturday that they were not aware which video clips were sent to the CBI lab for forensic test.
Earlier, forensic tests had revealed that two out of seven video clips containing “anti-national sloganeering” by JNU students were doctored. Truth Labs, which was asked to verify the videos by the Delhi government as part of a magisterial inquiry, had found serious tampering and insertion of “very special hate words” into the video clips.
The test had revealed that an audio was recorded separately and then synced with the video footage. However on Saturday, the Delhi Police claimed the footages they had sent to the CBI labs had tested genuine. Truth Labs officials said it was unclear how many clips and which ones had been sent to the CBI lab.
