Calcutta HC asks IPS officer Damayanti Sen to supervise 5th Bengal rape probe

IPS officer Damayanti Sen had investigated Kolkata’s Park Street gang rape case back in 2012 and arrested the four accused, though West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee had called it a fabricated case.

KOLKATA: The Calcutta high court on Friday told special commissioner of Kolkata Police, Damayanti Sen, to oversee the investigation into the alleged gang rape of a 40-year-old woman in Bengal’s South 24 Parganas district.

A 1996 batch IPS officer, Damayanti Sen was the first woman to head the detective department of the Kolkata Police in 2009. She was assigned by the Calcutta high court to oversee another rape investigation.

The woman was allegedly gang-raped on April 8 by her brother-in-law and his relative. Both have been arrested. The victim has alleged that the accused tried to burn her alive when she was alone at home. She was rushed to a state-run hospital where she is undergoing treatment.

The court’s orders on Friday came during a hearing into a plea for a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) investigation into the case. The court took note of records which showed that the victim had burn injuries. Although the bench did not order the CBI probe, the judges said the central investigating agency may be asked to take over if the state police probe is unsatisfactory.

This is the fifth rape investigation that the division bench of chief justice Prakash Srivastava and justice Rajarshi Bharadwaj has asked Sen to supervise.

In 2012, Sen cracked Kolkata’s Park Street gang rape case after chief minister Mamata Banerjee dismissed the case as fabricated.

The court has given Sen the liberty to approach the bench in case she faces any difficulty in supervising the investigation.

In the plea for a CBI probe on Friday, the petitioner alleged that the gang rape case was not being investigated properly. The site of the crime had not been sealed and statements of the victim’s neighbours, who heard her scream, were not recorded, the petitioner said.

Countering this, West Bengal’s advocate general SN Mookherjee told the court said that the police arrested the accused and booked them under relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code. He said statement of the victim was recorded under Section 164 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC) and statements of the witnesses were recorded under Section 161 of the CrPC. Medico-legal examinations of both the accused and the victim have been done, Mookherjee informed the bench.