BENGALURU: The Special Investigation Team (SIT) began the investigation into the sensational rape case involving former Hassan JDS MP Prajwal Revanna May last year with a leaked video of his sexual aggression against his employee and the victim’s statement, SIT chief and Additional Director General of Police (ADGP), Criminal Investigation Department (CID), BK Singh, said.
Prajwal was convicted in the case by the special court on August 1 and sentenced to life imprisonment on Saturday.
Soon after the sentencing, in a first and exclusive chat with TNIE, the SIT chief said that the evidence borne out of investigation in the rape case rested on “victim’s statement, forensic science and tools including DNA matching and voice sampling etc”.
Narrating the trail of investigation, he said that the video, with graphic details of the rape shot by Prajwal, mainly to blackmail and silence the victim “did not show his face”. “The face was kept out of the video to escape identification in case it became public. The SIT started scrolling for similar cases of sexual offence in which the face of the accused was not visible and the forensic tools were used to identify the perpetrator from his body parts shown in the leaked video.
The team chanced upon two international case studies; ‘Forensic Science, Medicine & Pathology’ in ‘Springer’ and ‘Turkiye Journal of Forensic Medicine & Forensic Sciences on forensic image comparison of penis in the identification of sexual offender,” said the senior police officer.
The investigation in the high profile case hit the first road block when the doctors in the government hospital refused to take photographs of Prajwal’s genitalia, citing violation of medical ethics. “Doctors medically examine a suspect or crime accused brought by the police. They are not authorised to take their photographs. The SIT sought court permission citing strong reasons for their request. With the court permission, the photographs were taken and forensically examined to verify whether the male organ in the rape video was that of Prajwal,” he said.
The morphological features of the accused and the one found in the video were compared to match his identity. These included checking the pigmented skin lesions (nevus), scars, unique pigmentation and shape of the male genitalia, similarities/discrepancies like skin colour, hair pattern, physique of body parts exposed in the video, for instance the hand. “The photographs obtained from the video identified the perpetrator with the help of a dermatologist and urologist,” said Singh.
A case of an online paedophile in which he had shared a photograph of his genitals with a teenaged girl also helped the SIT to progress in the case. The predator was tracked by an overseas law enforcement agency using the IP address of the computer from which the image was shared along with date and time of the image.
In the lawsuit that followed the forensic medicine specialist, with the help of dermatologist and urologist examined him physically and matched with the image to identify the paedophile.
In the Prajwal case, forensic tools were also used to help recreate the crime scene, where the rape had taken place.
“The perpetrators had dressed the walls but failed to take off the markings on the wall. The FSL team meticulously built the room frame by frame and the final image was of the room which was in the video,” said the SIT chief.
“The entire investigation in this case almost rested on digital technology and evidence borne out of forensic science and examination,” he added.