'Dead boy' appears in court

 It was a case of a dead person coming alive at the Karnataka High Court on Wednesday. A 16-year-old boy, Mahesh (name changed), who was declared dead, was produced before the court during the hearing of a suo motu habeas corpus petition.

There were surprises at the High Court, when the Division Bench comprising Justice K L Manjunath and Justice H S Kempanna was hearing the case. Kaveriamma, mother of Mahesh, had written to the High Court, seeking to provide details about the whereabouts of her son.

The boy had gone missing in Bangalore along with his friend M S Sachin, also aged 16. Sachin is the son of a school teacher from their home town Napoklu in Kodagu district. The two had come to the city, apparently to participate in a sports meet.

Initially, a missing complaint was lodged. The police zeroed in on Sachin, who is said to have been arrested by Napoklu Police on November 22, 2012 (based on the information by Sachin’s father himself) from a bar in Holenarasipura.

During the interrogation, the boy reportedly informed the police that his friend, who was standing at the door of a train, slipped and fell down near Holenarasipura.

However, one of Sachin’s relatives told Deccan Herald that the police picked him up from Holenarasipura town, tortured him and forcibly took a statement stating that he murdered his friend and had his body sealed in a gunny bag and threw it out of the moving train.

According to the relatives, the boy was falsely chargesheeted stating that he got his friend murdered along with some of his friends in Banaswadi.

The case was transferred to the City and the boy was sent to a juvenille home, after producing him before Madikeri JMFC court.

However, with some effort, his father (a teacher in a local government school) succeeded in getting him released on bail.

Following the suo motu habeas corpus petition, the Banaswadi Police submitted that no such incident was registered in their limits. The Division Bench, which took up the suo motu case, gave a dressing down to Napoklu police for chargsheeting a boy without any proof and the body was yet to be traced.

The matter was entrusted  to Central Crime Branch, Bangalore (CCB) of the City Police for further investigation. But the damage was already done as the Napoklu police had declared that the boy had been murdered. It had also hit the headlines in the local media.

Interestingly, after the court took up the suo motu habeas corpus petition, the Bench directed the CCB to file a report in this connection before January 5, 2013.
There was surprise in store for the court and even the advocates assembled here on Wednesday, when the government counsel Sampangiramaiah submitted that Mahesh is alive.

“The CCB police have rescued him from a hotel in Koramangala, where he was working and the boy is present before the court,” he said.

The counsel submitted that the duo had fled their home town and had got separated in the City. Fearing that his friend might be dead and he will not be spared, Sachin had fabricated the story of Mahesh falling off the train.

The Division Bench ordered the release of Sachin who was in the juvenille home for the ‘murder’ of his friend.