Cops allowed to take voice sample of accused in extortion case
A court here has allowed the Delhi police to obtain voice samples of Amit Shukla, one of the accused in TV journalist Soumya Viswanathan murder case, in connection with an alleged extortion racket being operated from inside the Tihar prison.
Chief metropolitan magistrate Vidya Prakash allowed the plea of Special Cell of Delhi police to record the voice sample of Shukla and his co-accused Arun Kumar at CFSL (CBI).
“Considering the entire facts and circumstances of the case including the nature of offences alleged to have been committed in this case, court does not find any reason to decline the application (of the police),” the CMM said.
While directing the director of central forensic science laboratory CFSL to fix a date and time for obtaining the voice sample of the accused, the court asked it to take “all possible precautions while obtaining the voice sample to rule out any possibility of tampering or interpolation.”
The police plea for voice sample was opposed by Shukla’s counsel Deepak Sharma, who had argued that the probe agency should have got the samples while his client was in police custody but it had failed to do so.
Sharma’s arguments, however, were rejected by the court. Early this year, the police had placed two mobile numbers on interception on the basis of an information that they were being used by some robbers or gangsters.
The intercepted calls revealed that Shukla, who was lodged in Jail no. 3 at Tihar, was calling one Rajender, a resident of Vaishali, and trying to allegedly extort Rs 1 lakh from him.
Shukla is accused in murder case of Vishwanathan who was shot at in a moving car in South Delhi on September 30, 2008. The Delhi police had arrested five persons, Shukla, Ajay Sethi, Ravi Kapoor, Baljit Malik and Ajay Kumar. Apart from various provisions of the IPC, the accused were also booked under Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA).
Post new comment