BHUBANESWAR: Dinakrushna Mishra, the suspended inspector-in-charge (IIC) of Bhubaneswar’s Bharatpur police station who has been booked for sexually assaulting an Army officer’s fiancee in custody on Sept 15, will undergo polygraph, narco-analysis and brain mapping tests in Gujarat, the Odisha crime branch said on Wednesday.
The sub-divisional judicial magistrate court in Bhubaneswar allowed the CB to subject Mishra to these tests at the state forensic science laboratory in Gandhinagar.Mishra, who was present in the court on Wednesday, formally consented to undergo the tests.
“We are planning to conduct a polygraph test of the female victim at a later stage,” a crime branch officer said.
The probe agency said they deliberately chose a forensic science laboratory outside Odisha to avoid any public suspicion of potential manipulation in the test results, had those been conducted within the state.
On Sept 15, the alleged Bharatpur custody torture took place when the Army officer and his fiancée visited Bharatpur police station to file a complaint against some individuals, who had allegedly assaulted them near Patharagadia following a road rage. She claimed that instead of taking action on their complaint, her fiancée was beaten up and she was molested in police custody.
However, police dismissed her allegations, saying she appeared to be drunk and misbehaved with female officers instead of filing a complaint. Police also claimed that the woman was non-cooperative and refused to undergo a breathalyzer test. She was subsequently arrested on charges of assault and damaging a computer.
The court observed that lie detector and other scientific tests are imperative to unravel the mystery.
“As the sequence of events occurred within the four walls of the police station without any eyewitnesses, scientific methodology may give a proper direction to the investigating agency to reach the truth. The court is satisfied to allow the investigating officer to conduct the three tests on the accused,” read the order.
In the court, Mishra dismissed the charges against him. “I am innocent. I am not involved in the offences as alleged against me,” the court order read quoting the suspended cop.
In a related development, a medical report (CT scan of the woman’s head) from AIIMS Bhubaneswar revealed no major abnormalities, with the exception of injuries to the skin above her left upper eyelid.
On Wednesday, the crime branch reconstructed the sequence of events at Bharatpur police station with the help of the couple and four of the five police personnel, who were suspended in the wake of her serious allegations.