KASARGOD: On May 5, 2005, the Department of Forest made a headline-grabbing seizure. The then Kasaragod forest range officer P Ramachandran and his team seized 8,800 kg of spent sandalwood dust and 825kg of sandalwood chips from the premises of Essential Oil Industries in Nayanmarmoola in Vidyanagar.
Sandalwood spent dust is obtained after the extraction of sandalwood oil and is used in making incense sticks and mosquito repellent coils.
Over the years, the department arrested the owner of the company N A Muhammed Sali, the truck owner K V Muhammed and two workers K P Jafar and Chemban Anees. After 16 years and seven months, the department could not ensure even one conviction.
The chief judicial magistrate K G Unnikrishnan acquitted all the four accused citing lack of evidence. "The court pulled up the officer Ramachandran for conducting a shoddy investigation," said P Faisal, one of the lawyers who represented the defendants.
Faisal said the Department of Forest did nothing right from the moment its officer got the alleged tip-off.
The forest officers did not take with them two credible witnesses, they did not send the samples of the sandalwood seized to a government lab for testing, they did not even produce the seized sandalwood before a court or before an authorised officer. "The prosecution could even scientifically prove what was seized by the Forest Department was sandalwood," he said. There were glaring procedural lapses in the investigation.
Ramachandran told the court that he submitted the evidence before his superior but he had no documentation to prove it. "He said he weighed the sandalwood but could not prove what weighing machine he used. He could not even say if the spent dust was in plastic sacks or jute sacks," said Faisal.
Ramachandran turned up in the court with the mahasar report, the final investigation report, and the arrest memo, he said.
The department should have at least produced the statements of the witnesses recorded under Section 161 of the CrPC, he said. "The court asked what kind of investigation was this," he said.
Though the sandalwood was seized in 2005, the chargesheet was filed after five years.
The truck owner was arrested in 2006, one year after the seizure, that too, when he was arrested in another case, said Faisal. "They added him to this case," he said.
Muhammed told the court he was falsely implicated in the case. "During the cross-examination, I told Ramachandran that now that he learned how not to conduct an investigation, he should educate his juniors to conduct a proper probe," Faisal said.