Madurai: The Madras High Court Bench has directed police to use e-Post facility to inform relatives or friends regarding the arrest of an individual and making an endorsement to that effect in the arrest memo.
Giving a direction to this effect, Justice N Kirubakaran said it became difficult to prove if relatives or friends were informed if the same was done over phone.
The judge agreed with counsel for the applicant R Gandhi that since the telegraph service had been discontinued, the best option available to police was to use e-post service offered by the Department of Posts.
He expressed displeasure over police using the phone to intimate the family of those arrested in criminal cases, despite a ban on the practice by a division bench in the Principal Seat of the High Court on August 29 2013.
K S Anwar alias Syed Anwar, claimed that a Sub-Inspector attached to the Central Crime Branch here did not follow any of the 11 directions issued by the Supreme Court in the D K Basu's case in 1997 while arresting him on June 25.
Police officers should have prepared an arrest memo with the date and time of arrest and get it attested by at least one witness, either a family member of the arrested person or a respectable person of the locality where the arrest is made.
The judge noted that the SI had just mentioned a phone number in the arrest memo and recorded that his wife had been informed of the arrest on that number.
