Calcutta High Court orders forensic test on Narada sting tapes

Kolkata, April 29 The Calcutta High Court on Friday ordered a forensic test on the Narada sting tapes.

The bench of Chief Justice Manjula Chellur and Justice A. Banerjee passed the order while hearing Public Interest Litigations seeking an independent agency probe into the sting which purportedly caught several Trinamool Congress leaders taking bribe.

The entire sting was carried using an iPhone and subsequently transferred to a laptop and then a pen drive.

While the iPhone and the pen drive were subsequently handed over by Narada News CEO Mathew Samuel to a court appointed special committee, he had refused to part with the laptop contending the committee needed to deposit the cost of the laptop before he can give them the device.

The court asked the director of the special committee to hand over personally the iPhone and the pen drive to the director of Central Forensic Science Laboratory (CFSL), Hyderabad. 

It also ordered Samuel to personally hand over the laptop to the CFSL, Hyderabad within a week.

The CFSL has been asked to conduct a forensic test to ascertain whether the iPhone, laptop and the pen drive have been tampered/engineered/doctored or are genuine. 

The lab has been asked to conduct the test "as expeditiously as possible" but not later than four weeks, and hand over the confidential report to the special committee director who would then place it before the court.

The Trinamool Congress had claimed the tapes were doctored, but opposed the opposition's demand for a scientific test on the tapes released in March.