Cal HC lens on police custody torture of 4 picked up from in front of Vidyasagar University

Kolkata: Calcutta High Court on Monday enquired about the alleged torture of Susrita Soren and three others in the police custody at the Women Police Station, Paschim Midnapore, after the agitators were picked up by the police from in front of Vidyasagar University on March 3.Justice Tirthankar Ghosh asked the questions and wanted the advocate general to place some more documents, if he wanted, to the court on the next hearing of the matter on Tuesday before passing orders.Justice Ghosh asked advocate general Kishore Datta whether the women were arrested for a cognizable offence or whether they were preventive arrests. When Datta submitted that they were preventive arrests, Justice Ghosh asked him why the police made the petitioners sign bail bonds, or personal recognizance (PR) bonds, if they were not arrests.The advocate general submitted that section 170 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS) mentions the word ‘arrest'. The BNSS empowers police officers to arrest individuals without a warrant if they have credible information about a person planning to commit a cognizable offense, and arresting them appears necessary to prevent the offence.Justice Ghosh was curious to know why the police kept the four women in custody for 16 hours before releasing them at 2 am on March 4. Justice Ghosh also wanted to know why the same person, Shirsendu Bikas Shasmal, furnished the bail bond or PR bond for all the four women."If the offence was bailable, police could have released them after the signing of the bail bond. What was the need for keeping them in custody for so long?" Justice Ghosh observed. He also held prima facie that the CCTV footage preserved by the Women Police Station had already been "manipulated".The advocate general submitted that the police do require to justify to the court for how many hours they had kept the women in custody unless the detention time didn't cross 24 hours. "We can't have blatant illegality. Maybe that all are not illegality, but they are irregularity," Justice Ghosh observed.The advocate general read out from the writ petition the allegations of torture on the arrested in the police van on their way to the police station. "The petition itself complains of torture before thy reached the police station," the advocate general said.The advocate general then relied on the complaints of the petitioners to doctors of Midnapore Medical College and later to those of Medical College and Hospital, Kolkata, in order to emphasize on the contemporaneous evidence available.Citing the medical complaints and prescriptions of doctors, the advocate general argued that there was no burn injury complaint though one of the petitioners had alleged pouring of molten wax on her fingers. Datta also submitted that there was no complaint of head pain even after the petitioner alleged in the petition that she was pulled by her hair and hung. The advocate general submitted that he was not aware of the findings of the X-Ray reports when doctors had prescribed such to identify fractures. The advocate general argued that the available evidence didn't inspire confidence of the court.