A Delhi court has rejected a plea filed by four Gujarat Police officers accused of taking a minor boy to Ahmedabad while searching for his father, saying that the policemen acted like “colonial overlords” and “hanged the child as bait” to make his father surrender.
The court was hearing a criminal revision petition filed by the four Gujarat Police officers challenging orders of a trial court that took cognisance of an offence of kidnapping and directed framing of charges against them. They allegedly forcibly took her minor son from her lawful custody to Gujarat. The complainant, the mother of the boy, alleged that on May 25, 2008, five-six Gujarat Police officers in civil clothes came to her scrap shop in Delhi looking for her husband, who was an accused in a case, according to the case details.
In the order dated August 12, the court said, “Their duty was to search for the accused who was the father of the minor and not to take the minor child in their custody and act like colonial overlords of the past and hang that minor child as a bait for his father to surrender before them.
Additional Sessions Judge Parveen Singh said the officers’ duty was to search for the minor’s father, who was wanted in a case, and not to take the child into custody and transport him across states from Delhi to Gujarat. The court held that taking the minor from his mother’s custody and transporting him to Ahmedabad for the purpose of locating his father “can by no stretch of imagination” be considered part of the policemen’s official duty.
