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Najeeb case: Delhi HC orders polygraph test of suspects
The bench told the lawyer that if the student does not want to undergo the lie-detector test, he can refuse to do so.
New Delhi: In order to take the investigations a notch higher, the Delhi high court has asked the police to explore other avenues of probe, like a polygraph test of persons connected with missing JNU student Najeeb Ahmed, as all other leads have failed to yield any result.
“The student had gone missing in October (2016), it is February now. Nearly four months have gone by and none of the leads are going anywhere. We asked for polygraph test as the other leads have not yielded any results,” a bench of justices GS Sistani and Vinod Goel said.
The bench was hearing an application by one of the nine students, who are suspects in the case, seeking recall of the high court’s December 14 and December 22, 2016 orders.
According to the application, by these two orders, the court was regulating the manner of investigation and therefore, prejudiced the probe and violated their rights under Articles 21 and 22 of the constitution.
The student has also challenged a notice issued to him by the Delhi police to appear before the trial court today to give consent for the lie-detector test. Delhi government’s senior standing counsel, Rahul Mehra, opposed the application, saying that the same student had moved a similar plea through another lawyer earlier and the high court had on January 23 disposed it of by asking the student to come forward.
Mr Mehra said that the present application was a “gross abuse of the process of court” and added that by moving such pleas, the “police was being forced to venture into areas where it had been abstaining from doing so till now.” He said that students should “behave as students” and they are “not above the law.”
The lawyer for the student said that he was aggrieved by the language used in the notice sent by the police which appeared to be over-reacting. The bench told the lawyer that if the student does not want to undergo the lie-detector test, he can refuse to do so.
But in the present case, “the students should assist the police by coming forward voluntarily and by joining the probe,” it said.
