HC rejects plea to reconstitute CBI team to trace missing boy

The Madras High Court today rejected a plea of the father of a 17-year-old boy to hand over the probe into the teenager's disappearance three years ago to a new CBI team of officers from north India, holding that it will be "sowing seeds of balkanisation" of the country if it accedes to such requests.
"Adverting to the request for constituting a new team of officers from North India, we feel that the request cannot be countenanced. India is divided into North, East, West, South only for geographical reasons to measure monsoon and drought and nothing more. The bureaucracy which is the steel frame of our country is one single organic entity and we will be sowing seeds of balkanisation of this country if we accede to such requests," a division bench of justices S Rajeswaran and P N Prakash said in its order.

The matter pertains to the mysterious disappearance of Sushil Mandal's son, a class IX student at a private school at Hosur, who left home at 8pm on October 15, 2011, and did not return.
Mandal had alleged that his son was kidnapped and kept in illegal detention by an Inspector of Central Excise, SIPCOT in Hosur with whose daughter his son had a friendship.
Police had registered his complaint. Meanwhile an unidentified decomposed body was fished out from a lake at Hosur on October 24.
The bench said as the petitioner was not satisfied with the investigation by local police, the probe was then transferred to the CB-CID and then again to the CBI.

Mandal said the decomposed body was not that of his son and filed a Habeas Corpus petition in the high court following which a CBI probe was ordered.

CBI investigations along with forensic and DNA test reports revealed that the body was that of Mandal's son.
Not satisfied with the report filed by CBI, he filed another petition to entrust the investigation to a team of officers of North Indian wing of CBI, which was rejected by the bench.
Closing the Habeas Corpus petition, the bench in its order directed the CBI to continue the investigation and also directed it to find out the mystery in the case. It also directed the CBI to investigate whether the SIPCOT Police tried to shield any guilty in the case.

"We find no justifiable reasons to reconstitute the investigation team as sought for by the counsel for the petitioner," the bench concluded.