E-Paper
Karnataka high court pulls up police for ‘shoddy’ probe in 2017 sexual assault case
According to the Karnataka high court documents, the petitioner complained that right from the beginning of the marriage in 2015, her husband’s behaviour was “torturous for having anal/unnatural sex”.
A single-judge bench of the Karnataka high court pulled up the police for its “shoddy investigation” into a 2017 case where a woman accused her husband of forcing her into unnatural sex as well harassing and assaulting her, Bar and Bench reported on Monday.
The police had filed a charge sheet on September 26, 2019, but did not invoke section 377 (unnatural offences) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) or relevant sections of the Information and Technology act in the case and only added a case of domestic violence.
“The crime was no doubt registered for all the offences, but the shady probe conducted by the jurisdictional police (Bangalore City Police) has led to the filing of a charge sheet only for an offence under Section 498A of the IPC. Therefore, this becomes a classic case where the investigation has been so shoddy that a further investigation into the matter is needed,” the high court said in its order passed on May 25.
According to the court documents, the petitioner complained that right from the beginning of the marriage in 2015, her husband’s behaviour was “torturous for having anal/unnatural sex”.
“It is contended that for the performance of such unnatural acts, the husband used to abuse, assault and torture the petitioner. Becoming unbearable, after about three months of marriage, the petitioner left the place of the husband to reside with her parents in Raipur. The husband persuaded the wife to return on the promise that he would change his behaviour, but nothing changed, and the latter left to her parents for good this time.
“Later, it appears that the husband began to threaten her to return to be with him, failing which he would leak all obscene pictures of her on social media. He also forwarded certain obscene pictures of her to the Facebook account of her father and also to his WhatsApp number and also to two of her friends,” according to the court order.
It was around this tie that the petitioner registered a complaint in Raipur under Section 498A, 377, 34 of the IPC as well as under the information technology act.
Since the incidents took place in Bengaluru, the Raipur police transferred the case.
The high court asked that the new investigation officer to present the findings within two months of the order, and until then, trial shall not commence.
