HT Digital
GUWAHATI, Mar 13: The Gauhati High Court has ordered Assam Chief Secretary and Director General of Police (DGP) to make sure that law enforcement agencies abide by legal processes strictly when arresting a person without a warrant.
The court reiterated that according to Section 47 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS), 2023, and special laws such as Section 52(1) of the NDPS Act, 1985, police must give a suitable notice during arrest.
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The notice should contain complete information on the offence, the nature of the offence, and the rationale for arrest, as per the court judgment. It also added that non-compliance with these constitutional prerequisites would make the arrest invalid, as it would contravene constitutional provisions.
A replica of the court order has also been dispatched to the Chief Secretary, the DGP, and the Director of the Judicial Academy, Assam, to spread awareness among them about these legal provisions and their proper implementation.
The matter came to the fore when a bail petition filed by Sakib Choudhury, represented by lawyers Bijon Kumar Mahajan and Arshad Choudhury, was heard. Sakib Choudhury was arrested from a Mangaldai hotel in January and charged with running several fake accounts in the names of firms, companies, and NGOs.
Along with four others, he was accused of bank fraud for transferring funds from target accounts to their own receiver accounts. Investigators charge that Choudhury hired hackers to clone target accounts and enable the fraud.
The defence attorneys had maintained that the police had not apprised their client of the reasons for his arrest, thereby infringing on his constitutional rights under Article 22(1) of the Indian Constitution and his statutory rights under Section 47 of the BNSS, 2023. They argued that such procedural failure rendered the arrest illegal.
But Additional Public Prosecutor RR Kaushik was opposed to the granting of bail and said that enough incriminating evidence was in the case diary against Choudhury. The high court, however, granted bail to Sakib Choudhury on a bond of Rs 50,000 with two sureties of an equal amount to the Chief Judicial Magistrate, Darrang.
