New Delhi: The Uttar Pradesh Police’s Special Task Force (STF) has approached a local court in Mathura seeking permission to collect voice and handwriting samples of Malayalam journalist Siddique Kappan, who has been jailed since last year in an alleged conspiracy case related to the Hathras gangrape and murder case.
According to the Indian Express, the STF has claimed that it has retrieved a voice message from Kappan’s phone, which is in Malayalam, sent to another person and it needed Kappan’s voice sample to continue the investigation.
“Applications seeking permission to collect Kappan’s voice and handwriting samples have been moved in a local court of Mathura. The court is likely to take up petitions [on Thursday],” district government counsel in Mathura, Shivram Singh said, according to the newspaper.
Kappan and three others – Atiq-ur-Rahman, Masood Ahmed and Alam, who are members of the Popular Front of India – were arrested in October last year while they were on their way to Hathras. While the journalist was said to be on his way to the district to report on the gangrape and murder of a Dalit woman, the UP police claim that they were going to Hathras to create tensions as part of a conspiracy to ‘defame’ the state government.
According to the Indian Express, the police have claimed that they recovered six cellphones from the possession of the four accused. These were sent to the Forensic Science Laboratory (FSL) in Agra for ab examination and one of the cellphones belonged to Kappan, they said.
The laboratory’s report refers to a voice message in Malayalam sent to a person from Kappan’s cellphone, according to the police. The STF needs Kappan’s voice sample to verify the voice, seeking the court’s direction to take the journalist to the FSL and collect a sample.
The newspaper added that permission was also sought to collect Kappan’s handwriting sample because during the search of his residence in Delhi’s Jungpura, the police claimed to have found few handwritten documents in English. Some of the documents are “questionable”.
Kappan and the other accused are currently lodged in Mathura jail.