Telangana High Court on Wednesday instructed the State government to pass on the entire records relating to a drugs case probed by Telangana Prohibition and Excise department in year 2017.
A bench of Chief Justice Satish Chandra Sharma and Justice Abhinand Kumar Shavili, disposing of a PIL petition, said the government must share with the ED authorities entire data relating to the 12 first information reports (FIRs) filed in that drugs related case of 2017. The PIL plea was filed by Member of Parliament from Malkajgiri and Telangana Pradesh Congress Committee president A. Revanth Reddy.
The petitioner, stating that the P&E authorities declined to share the records available with them in the 2017 drugs case in which 30 persons were detained. The kingpin in that case Kelvin and several others were questioned by the SIT of the P&E department. Nearly 15 Tollywood celebrities were grilled by the investigators in that case. However, no charge-sheet was filed against any of the questioned Tollywood actors in that case.
Mr. Reddy sought an investigation into the drugs case of 2017 by Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB), CBI or any other special agency. When an interim application filed in the plea came up for hearing on Wednesday, Special Government Pleader Sanjeev Kumar told the bench that all the information sought by the ED authorities was presented before the trial court in July/August of 2017. The State did not possess any copies of the documents related to that cases at present, he told the bench.
However, ED Joint Director and IPS officer Abhishek Goyal, who appeared for the court proceedings virtually, informed the bench that neither the State government nor the trial court had not furnished any documents to the ED authorities. After hearing contentions of the ED JD and the SGP, the Chief Justice observed that while the drugs menace was playing havoc with the country’s youth the government was not cooperating with the ED.
While instructing the government to hand over all the records pertaining to the case to the ED authorities, the bench said there was no need to hand over the drugs case to CBI or any special agency. The bench said the trial court would furnish all the papers presented by the State government to the ED authorities within 15 days.
The mobile phone call data record of all the persons connected to the 2017 drugs case should be provided to the ED within 30 days, the bench said. Making it clear that non-compliance of the bench’s order would be viewed seriously, the CJ said the ED was free to approach the HC if the records of the case were not presented to it.
