The Allahabad high court directed the superintendent of police (SP), Farrukhabad, to register an FIR against an investigating officer (IO) after finding that additional particulars in the reasons for arrest column pertaining to an accused were inserted subsequently.
The court further declared the accused-petitioner’s arrest unlawful and ordered his immediate release while holding that the reasons for arrest and grounds of arrest had not been communicated to him in accordance with law.
A division bench comprising justices Atul Sreedharan and Achal Sachdev observed that the investigating officer appeared to have committed an offence under chapter XIV of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), which deals with false evidence and offenses against public justice.
The court was hearing a habeas corpus plea filed by a Farukkhabad resident -Mohd Yaseen, who was arrested on September 14, 2026, according to the arrest memo.
However, in his petition, he claimed that he had actually been taken into custody on September 13, when he went to the police station along with his lawyer to join the investigation into the death of the complainant’s daughter.
The complainant’s daughter had allegedly died by suicide because of harassment by the petitioner.
{{/usCountry}}The complainant’s daughter had allegedly died by suicide because of harassment by the petitioner.
{{/usCountry}}The lower court had also rejected his bail application. However, the high court found that the arrest memo placed on record by the petitioner was deficient in material particularly relating to the reasons for arrest.
The state, however, submitted that the reasons for arrest had been separately prepared and supplied to the petitioner on September 14, 2026, and that the document purportedly bore his signature. The court examined the scanned copies of the documents produced by the state and compared them with the documents annexed with the habeas corpus petition. The court found that the arrest memo produced by the state was identical to the arrest memo supplied to the petitioner. However, the document containing the reasons for arrest of the Petitioner was different.
The court noted that the copy of the reasons for arrest furnished to the petitioner mentioned only section 108 of the BNS (Abetment of suicide). Interestingly, as the court noted, the remaining particulars, that a case had been registered and that evidence had emerged indicating that the deceased had committed suicide on account of harassment allegedly meted out to her by the petitioner, were conspicuously absent from the copy supplied to the petitioner.
The court observed that the only logical inference from these circumstances was that the petitioner had never been supplied with the reasons for arrest.
Deprecating the police action, the court observed that the IO had apparently fabricated evidence to satisfy the requirements relating to the reasons for arrest and the arrest memo, which had never been supplied to the petitioner, and to deny him relief during the remand and bail proceedings.
While fixing November 16 as the next date of hearing, the high court in its order dated November 4 directed the SP to file a compliance report within seven days.