Calcutta HC asks IPS officer Damayanti Sen to supervise 5th Bengal rape probe – Hindustan Times

KOLKATA: The Calcutta high court on Friday told special commissioner of Kolkata Police, Damayanti Sen, to oversee the investigation into the alleged gang rape of a 40-year-old woman in Bengal’s South 24 Parganas district.

The woman was allegedly gang-raped on April 8 by her brother-in-law and his relative. Both have been arrested. The victim has alleged that the accused tried to burn her alive when she was alone at home. She was rushed to a state-run hospital where she is undergoing treatment.

The court’s orders on Friday came during a hearing into a plea for a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) investigation into the case. The court took note of records which showed that the victim had burn injuries. Although the bench did not order the CBI probe, the judges said the central investigating agency may be asked to take over if the state police probe is unsatisfactory.

This is the fifth rape investigation that the division bench of chief justice Prakash Srivastava and justice Rajarshi Bharadwaj has asked Sen to supervise.

On April 12, the bench asked Sen to supervise the probes into four alleged rapes cases reported in three districts. While two cases were reported from North 24 Parganas district, One case each is from Malda district and Kolkata. All the cases were reported in March.

In 2012, Sen cracked Kolkata’s Park Street gang rape case after chief minister Mamata Banerjee dismissed the case as fabricated.

The court has given Sen the liberty to approach the bench in case she faces any difficulty in supervising the investigation.

In the plea for a CBI probe on Friday, the petitioner alleged that the gang rape case was not being investigated properly. The site of the crime had not been sealed and statements of the victim’s neighbours, who heard her scream, were not recorded, the petitioner said.

Countering this, West Bengal’s advocate general SN Mookherjee told the court said that the police arrested the accused and booked them under relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code. He said statement of the victim was recorded under Section 164 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC) and statements of the witnesses were recorded under Section 161 of the CrPC. Medico-legal examinations of both the accused and the victim have been done, Mookherjee informed the bench.