UP cop adds ‘not’ before ‘consent’ in woman’s statement, sends lover to jail

BAREILLY: A sub-inspector in Shahjahanpur, UP, has been suspended for allegedly altering a woman’s testimony by inserting the word “not“ in her statement to falsely claim that her elopement was “without consent“, leading to her lover’s arrest. The cop was apparently acting “as per instructions of senior officers in elopement cases involving minors“.SP (rural) Bhaware Deeksha Arun said SI Sanjeev Kumar was found guilty in a court-ordered probe. The tampering involved overwriting the word “not” in the woman’s written statement, contradicting her video testimony where she clearly said she had eloped willingly.“The SI might have misunderstood instructions of senior officers and thought that every accused who eloped with a girl must be jailed. The direction was merely for cases involving minor victims as their consent doesn’t count. However, we are probing the role of the SHO and the SI who wrote the statement,” said the SP.The SHO concerned, Rajeev Tomar, told TOI that he was not aware of what had happened. When the girl’s lover was presented before court for police remand, the court refused.Notably, the woman from an area under Jalalabad police station had eloped with the man of her own will. Both are in their 20s. Police later traced them to Khatu Shyam in Rajasthan and brought them back to UP.The woman was presented before the court of additional chief judicial magistrate Manish Kumar Singh on April 16. Her written statement, produced before the magistrate, was found tampered with, following which the magistrate ordered the production of video evidence in which she clearly said she had eloped with her consent.Police allegedly altered her statement in the official records by inserting the word “not”, thereby changing the statement to “I did not go of my own will” from the original “I did go of my own will”.