Chennai: Unsatisfied with the explanation given by the police for not transferring a forgery case from local police to the City Crime Branch in Coimbatore district, as directed by the court earlier, the Madras High Court ordered the Inspector of Police, Sulur police station to hand over the case diary to Superintendent of Police, CB-CID, Coimbatore. Justice P.N. Prakash gave the directive while passing orders on a petition from R. Dharmalingam of Coimbatore.
The matter relates to the alleged sale agreement made by one Ramakutty Gounder, father of the petitioner, in favour of one N.J. Subramaniam on March 15, 2006. As per the agreement, Ramakutty agreed to sell his property to Subramaniam. After the death of Ramakutty, Subramaniam filed a suit for a specific performance against the legal heirs of Ramakutty. After Dharmalingam found that the sale agreement was allegedly a forged document in as much as the stamp paper for the agreement itself was purchased only on December 23, 2008, in the name of Subramaniam, which was after the death of his father, he lodged a complaint with the Sulur police. As the local police failed to investigate the case properly, he filed a petition for transfer of the investigation from local police to CCB. So, while the police served a notice on him, informing that further action had been dropped in the case.
Pulling up the local police for their inaction, the judge had on September 16 directed the Sulur police to transfer the investigation to CCB. Despite the same, the police had not taken any steps to transfer the investigation in the case and hence Dharmalingam filed the present petition. Rejecting the contention of the police that orders have to be obtained from the DGP for the transfer of the investigation, the judge in his present order said, “This court is unable to countenance this explanation. The Sulur police station lies within the Coimbatore rural police district and the CCB lies within Coimbatore City police district.
“Therefore, it is too technical to say that the files have to go all the way to the office of the DGP for transfer of the case diary from Sulur police station to the CCB and that apart when this court had directed transfer of investigation, the police cannot take such a specious plea for justifying their inaction”.
