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Journalism of Courage
On the evening of June 2, 2014, an undergraduate student of Hinduja College in South Mumbai was at Marine Drive near Girgaum Chowpatty clicking photographs with his friends when he noticed a boy floating in the sea face down. Unable to understand if he was floating or swimming, the student and his friends entered the sea to take a closer look. The students also alerted lifeguards from a nearby water sports facility. The lifeguards couldn’t detect pulse on the boy, who was then taken to Saifee Hospital. There the boy was declared dead. He appeared to be around 12. The DB Marg police first registered an Accidental Death Register (ADR), which was then transferred to the Marine Drive police station, in whose jurisdiction the body was found.
Nothing was found to help identify the body. Investigators at Marine Drive police station said they made multiple attempts to find out who the boy was. “We checked missing children registers across the city and even other states. We took the boy’s photograph to schools. We also sought information from families on the streets in the area, as well from other children in shelter homes for street kids, but found no clue,” said an investigator who was at the police station in 2014, but has been transferred. Police also published the boy’s photograph in newspapers and the police gazette, but no information was forthcoming. The police themselves conducted the boy’s funeral.
According to police, the first “breakthrough” came six months later, with the arrest of three men by VP Road police on December 29, 2014. Police claimed that those arrested on suspicion of theft had “confessed” to their involvement in the murder of the boy. Since the victim’s postmortem had revealed the cause of death as ‘asphyxia due to choking and subdural hemorrhage and anal injuries’, police converted the ADR into a criminal case of murder and sexual assault under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act. Police claimed that the arrested men told them they had tried to sexually abuse the boy and inserted a polythene bag in his mouth to prevent him from screaming, which led to his suffocation and death. They then threw his body in the sea, police said. The men also named three others involved in the crime, two of whom were then arrested. However, despite claiming that the case was “solved”, police could still not identify the victim.
“A major roadblock was that we could not get any DNA traces from the body to help identify the accused, as the body was found in water,” said another investigator, who was also subsequently transferred.
In November 2017, a special court acquitted all five arrested men due to lack of evidence. Defence lawyers argued in court that the men were “framed”. The court observed that the “confession” by the accused was made before police, not recorded in front of a magistrate, and was not admissible. It further said there were no eyewitness or any circumstantial evidence to link the accused to the offence.
While the five men spent nearly three years in prison before their acquittal, the court gave the investigating officer the liberty to file a supplementary chargesheet against a sixth absconding accused, who was never arrested, if relevant evidence comes to the fore.
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