Chennai: Two police constables have been transferred in Tamil Nadu’s Tirunelveli district in connection with the case of custodial torture by the suspended IPS officer Balveer Singh, police said.
Constable Bogan from Vikramsinghapuram division and Rajkumar from Kallidaikurchi have been transferred to the armed reserve in Palayamkottai on the orders of Tirunelveli superintendent of police P Saravanan. The move comes amidst victims saying that police are pressuring them to turn hostile.
“We have transferred them for enquiry purposes. If they remain in the same station, there will be conflict of interest,” Saravanan said. “Sub-inspector Vasudevan has also been suspended but in a different matter on charges of corruption.”
Singh, a 2020-batch officer, in his first posting as assistant superintendent of police in Tirunelveli district, has been accused of pulling the teeth of several men and crushing testicles of two men inside the Ambasamudram police station.
Mohamed Shabbir Alam, sub-collector and sub-divisional magistrate of Cheranmahadevi, is recording the statements of the victims. During recording, one victim had turned hostile saying that he fell down and broke his tooth. Another victim Vetha Narayanan, an auto driver, had told HT earlier that constable Bogan approached him urging him to also give a statement that he fell down and broke his tooth, but Narayanan refused to budge.
Human rights organisations and political parties are demanding that an FIR be filed against IPS officer Singh. Henri Tiphagne, executive director, People’s Watch, said that either the district collector or the superintendent of police should have obtained the CCTV footage of the police station.
“According to the Police Reforms Act 2013, the district collector has the authority to conduct an investigation but instead he assigned it to the sub-collector under police standing orders. That is an outdated practice,” Tiphagne said. Activist Jayaram Venkatesh said that if the senior police officials were serious about law and order, Singh must be arrested immediately. The CPI(M) protested in Tirunelveli on Sunday demanding justice for the victims.
