HYDERABAD: The Telangana High Court on Thursday reserved orders in a criminal revision petition filed by the SIT challenging the dismissal by the ACB court of its memo seeking to add as accused senior BJP leader BL Santhosh, Jaggu Swamy, Tushar Vellappally and B Srinivas in the poaching case FIR.
Stating that he has never come across in his career such a procedure now used by the SIT of filing a memo proposing to array the accused, N Ramchander Rao, former MLC and senior counsel for Srinivas, urged the court not to stay the ACB court order. Stating that the ACB court had gone into minute aspects of the case before rejecting the memo, he said that the court had correctly stated that Section 8 of the PC Act does not apply to this case since no money was recovered at the site of the alleged crime.
Senior counsel claimed that the SIT shouldn’t have listed the quartet as accused when the matter was still being investigated and notices to other accused under Section 41A CrPC were being challenged in the High Court. The ACB judge even noted that the entire case was filed under the PC Act and other election-related offences, for which the maximum sentence is less than seven years, Rao pointed out, and asked: “If so, how come the law and order police are looking into the matter?”
After the lunch break, V Ravichandran, senior counsel for Ramchandra Bharati, criticised the SIT’s method in filing a document arraying accused. “The SIT cannot continue to add accused to the FIR without filing an affidavit on oath,” he said. He added: “If that be the case, we never know as to how many new persons will be arrayed as accused.”
The senior attorney said that the supplied images and WhatsApp communications could not be trusted and asked the judge to reject the criminal revision case that SIT had filed.
Advocate-general (A-G) BS Prasad, representing the SIT, presented a series of Supreme Court judgments to support his contention that the IO has the authority to charge any suspect as an accused in criminal cases. It is a simple memo informing the court about the proposed accused, who are required for further investigation, he said.
According to the A-G, the ACB judge lacked jurisdiction to deal with the memo in this manner, especially since the High Court was seized of the entire batch of writ petitions.
The A-G said that the accused have not contested the FIR in the Moinabad police station. “Their sole request is that the CBI or another SIT take up the investigation of this matter. If cases are tried in this way, what happens to cases that CCS and CID investigated and the ACB court decided on?” he asked. The court deferred its orders for Friday after carefully considering the arguments.
NEVER SEEN SIT FOLLOW SUCH A METHOD, AGREES JUDGE
Agreeing with Rao, Justice D Nagarjun stated that he too had never seen the SIT follow a similar method in lower courts. The judge then raised a hypothetical question about what would happen to the entire probe if the High Court allowed all of the petitions contesting the 41A Cr. PC notices