Karnataka high court quashes narcotics Act case against techie, says action based only on co-accused’s statement

Bengaluru: The high court quashed proceedings under Narcotics and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act against a techie, ruling that the case was registered only on the confession statement of a co-accused and allowing it to continue will amount to abuse of law.

Justice M Nagaprasanna passed the order while allowing a petition filed by techie, who is from Hubballi and works in Bengaluru.

The case stemmed from a June 20, 2023, operation in which a team of Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) officers intercepted a Speed Post parcel suspected to have contained drugs. The parcel, sent from Coimbatore, was addressed to petitioner at Marathalli Colony and was found to contain silver foil with 50 blot papers in a printed pattern, believed to be LSD tablets.

The investigating team arranged a controlled delivery using a dummy parcel. Petitioner's former roommate, Abhay Kumar (A2) told NCB sleuths that he booked the parcel in petitioner's name(A3) with a request that he (Abhay ) would collect the parcel later.

Based on this statement, petitioner was summoned under Section 67(2) of NDPS Act. Abhay was named accused no. 2 in the case and another engineer, Ayush Kishore Borse, was accused no. 1.

Petitioner, a BTech graduate from NIT Surathkal working as a business operations associate in a software company in Bengaluru, argued he had no idea about the contents of the parcel and Abhay requested him to receive it and give it to him. He added there was no evidence to show he either received or transferred money.

Petitioner claimed the procedure stipulated under Sections 50-A and 2(vii)(b) of the Act was not followed — the controlled delivery system. The proceedings against Abhay were quashed by the high court in Jan last year over violation of procedure pertaining to the controlled delivery system.

However, NCB opposed the petition and said there was other evidence available against Petitioner.

After perusing the materials on record, including voluntary statements of all three accused, Justice Nagaprasanna rejected NCB's request. "There is nothing to show that the petitioner is involved in the crime other than the voluntary or confession statement recorded in the course of investigation. In Tofan Singh vs state of Tamil Nadu case and later judgments, the Supreme Court clearly spelt out that conviction cannot be made solely on confessional statements as they have no evidentiary value," the judge added.