Madras high court issues directions to handle missing person cases
Picture for representational purpose Illustration: G Joy
Chennai: The Madras high court has issued a set of directions to authorities to deal with cases of missing persons as police at the lower level are very insensitive in handling these and scientifically investigating cases of unidentified bodies, Closing Pensiliya’s habeas corpus petition (HCP), a division bench, comprising Justices S. Rajeswaran and P. N. Prakash, in a recent judgment, observed that there was a steady increase in petitions being filed before the court where the police were able to match the missing person with an unclaimed body only after an HCP was filed.
“We ponder over the plight of hundreds of innocent and poor citizens whose kith and kin would have gone missing, but they may not have had the wherewithal to invoke the habeas corpus jurisdiction. Therefore, we felt that a machinery must be put in place whereby even without approaching this court, the aggrieved should get redressal,” the bench said.
The bench said that the problems arose only when the local police dragged their feet in registering an FIR when a case of a missing person was reported to them. This issue has come to the notice of the higher echelons in the police department and several instructions have been issued by DGP to all police units to register an FIR whenever such a case was reported and to take up investigation in a scientific manner, despite which the police at the lower levels were indeed very insensitive as could be seen from the facts of this case too.
The bench said that it also came across cases where relatives of missing persons very seriously disputed and refused to accept unidentified bodies that were matched by the State Crime Record Bureau. One of the reasons was that during the inquest of an unidentified body, the police determined the age arbitrarily and entered it in the requisition form that was sent with the body for a post-mortem. They did not make a specific request to the doctor conducting the autopsy to determine the age.
The post-mortem certificate records the age as noted in the inquest report and on account of this discrepancy, relatives of the missing person refuse to accept his death.
“Therefore, we direct the police to specifically make a request to the post-mortem doctor to determine the age of the unidentified body scientifically. We also direct the investigating officer to take fingerprints wherever possible from unidentified bodies and send these to the TN Finger Print Bureau, which is part of the SCRB, where there is a massive data base stored in Fingerprint Analysis and Criminal Tracing System (FACTS BASE).
The investigating officer should also collect the femur bone and molar tooth of the unidentified body from the post-mortem doctor and keep it along with the apparel and other objects found on the dead body at least for a minimum period of three years. Whenever a dispute arises, the DNA from the relatives can be extracted and profiling can be done with the DNA extracted from the femur and molar tooth by the TN Forensic Sciences Laboratory,” the bench added.
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