The Madras High Court has ordered a CBI probe into the mysterious disappearance of an individual who was serving as an examiner in the Military Intelligence at the Army headquarters in New Delhi till he went missing from his residence in Chennai on June 6, 2010.
Justice P.N. Prakash directed the Superintendent of Police, Crime CB-CID, here to hand over the case diary to the Superintendent of Police, Special Crime Branch, CBI, Chennai, for entrusting the case to a competent officer for further investigation.
The investigation was transferred on the solitary ground that the missing person, Gnanaprakasam, was working in a sensitive department in the armed forces and that interests of justice would be subserved if the case was entrusted to a central agency such as the CBI.
Disposing of a petition filed by the officer’s wife Yamuna Gnanaprakasam seeking a CBI probe, the judge pointed out that the Adambakkam police in the city had registered a ‘man missing’ case immediately after his disappearance in 2010 but could not succeed in tracing his whereabouts.
CB-CID’s decision
In 2014, the High Court transferred the investigation to the CB-CID at the instance of the present petitioner and that agency too could not make any substantial progress despite examining as many as 104 witnesses. Hence, the CB-CID recently filed a report before a lower court for closing the case temporarily.
Aggrieved with the report, the petitioner had moved the High Court once again seeking a direction to transfer the probe to the CBI and fix a time limit for completing the investigation. And the judge acceded to the request for a CBI probe without returning a finding that the CB-CID investigation was perfunctory.
“This court finds that the missing person was in Army Intelligence, and therefore, a thorough probe by a centralised agency may bear fruit,” the judge said and refused to fix a time limit. “No time limit can be fixed for cases of this nature since the issue is already eight years old,” the judge observed.