Test identification parade of accused must in kidnapping cases: Allahabad High Court

The court passed the direction after coming across numerous cases where FIR was lodged against unknown persons and chargesheet was filed against the accused merely on the basis of information received from the informer without test identification parade.

The court noted that this resulted in no evidence of identifying the kidnapper by the victim. It added that because of this serious lacuna, numbers of accused have been granted bail.

Case

In this case it was alleged that the victim, a 12-year-old boy, was recovered from the custody of accused’s wife.

The counsel for the accused submitted that he was falsely implicated merely because the boy was recovered from the custody of his wife. It was further argued that the accused was not identified by the victim boy as one of the kidnappers.

The counsel for the state submitted that during investigation the police has not conducted any identification parade to identify the applicant as one of the kidnappers.

The court noted that the accused was not identified by the victim boy as no identification parade was conducted by the police.

“it is not in dispute that the victim was recovered from the custody of wife of the applicant but not from the applicant, couple with the fact that, he was not identified by the victim boy as no identification parade was conducted by the police regarding identification of the kidnappers,” the order read.

The court, therefore, considering the nature of offence, evidence, and complicity of the accused granted bail to the accused.