Prayagraj (UP), Nov 6 (PTI) The Allahabad High Court has directed the Farrukhabad superintendent of police to register an FIR against an investigating officer, after finding that he appeared to have inserted additional particulars in the 'reasons for arrest' column in a case at a later point in time.
A bench comprising Justice Atul Sreedharan and Justice Achal Sachdev was of the view that the investigating officer appeared to have committed an offence under Chapter XIV of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, which deals with false evidence and offences against public justice.
Hearing a habeas corpus petition, the court also declared the arrest of the accused-petitioner unlawful and ordered his immediate release, while holding that the reasons for arrest and grounds of arrest had not been communicated to him in accordance with law.
According to the arrest memo, the petitioner, Mohammad Yaseen of Farrukhabad, was arrested on September 14, 2026.
Yaseen's petition claimed that he had actually been taken into custody on September 13, when he had gone to the police station along with his lawyer to join an investigation into the death of the complainant's daughter.
The complainant's daughter had allegedly died by suicide on account of harassment by the petitioner. The court concerned had also rejected Yaseen's bail application.
The high court found that the arrest memo placed on record was deficient in material particulars related to the reasons for his arrest.
However, the state submitted that the reasons for arrest had been separately prepared and supplied to the petitioner on September 14, 2026, and that the document purportedly bore his signature.
The court compared the documents produced by the state and the documents annexed to the habeas corpus petition. It found that the arrest memo produced by the state was identical to the arrest memo supplied to the petitioner, but the document containing the reasons for arrest was different.
The court noted that the copy of the reasons for arrest furnished to the petitioner mentioned only Section 108 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (abetment of suicide).
The court noted that interestingly, the remaining particulars -- that a case had been registered and that evidence had emerged indicating that the complainant's daughter had committed suicide on account of harassment allegedly meted out to her by the petitioner -- were conspicuously absent from the copy supplied to the accused-petitioner.
The court observed that the only logical inference from these circumstances was that the petitioner had never been supplied with the reasons for arrest.
This reflected that an offence under Chapter XIV of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita relating to false evidence and offence against public justice appeared to have been committed by the investigating officer, the court observed.
It observed that the investigating officer had apparently fabricated evidence to satisfy the requirements related to the 'reasons for arrest' and the arrest memo, which had never been supplied to the petitioner and to deny him relief during the remand and bail proceedings.
The high court fixed November 16 as the next date of hearing. In its order issued on Wednesday, it directed the superintendent of police to file a compliance report within seven days.
(This story has not been edited by THE WEEK and is auto-generated from PTI)