Delhi court upholds kidnapping charges against four Gujarat Police officers

Four Gujarat Police officers will face trial on kidnapping charges after a Delhi court upheld an earlier order taking cognisance of the alleged offence and framing charges.

Additional Sessions Judge Parveen Singh, in an August 12 order, dismissed the officers’ challenge to the trial court’s decision. The case concerns allegations that five or six police personnel in civilian clothes came to a woman’s scrap shop in Delhi in May 2008 while looking for her husband, who was wanted in a criminal case, and took her minor son to Gujarat.

The court recorded allegations that the child was confined, abused and beaten during the journey. Prosecutors also relied on the boy’s statement before a magistrate, in which he allegedly said he had been held in a police lock-up and tortured.

The officers argued that they had acted in the course of official duty and that prior government sanction was required before they could be prosecuted. The court rejected that argument, holding that such protection applies only when the alleged act has a reasonable connection with official duty.

The judge said the officers had been assigned to search for the father and that taking the child from his mother and transporting him to Ahmedabad could not be treated as part of that duty. The order said the child could not be used as “bait” to secure his father’s surrender.

The order also recorded that cognisance in the case was taken in 2010, rather than 2026 as stated in the revision petition. The ruling on charges does not decide the officers’ guilt.