Mumbai:The whereabouts of former Mumbai police commissioner Param Bir Singh were not known, the Maharashtra government on Wednesday told the Bombay High Court. As the IPS officer was not traceable, it did not wish to continue its assurance that no coercive action (such as arrest) would be taken against him in an Atrocities Act case, the government said.
Senior counsel Darius Khambata, appearing for the state, told a division bench of Justices Nitin Jamdar and Sarang Kotwal that the circumstances had changed.
"He isn't traceable. In these circumstances, we do not want to continue our earlier statement where the government said it would not take any coercive action against him," Khambata said.
Param Bir Singh's counsel Mahesh Jethmalani said he had not been declared as an absconder yet. "In this case, he was summoned twice and both the times he responded," Jethmalani said. The judges adjourned the hearing to the next week.
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The high court was hearing a petition filed by the senior IPS officer seeking to quash the FIR lodged against him under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act and relevant IPC sections on a complaint filed by police inspector Bhimrao Ghadge.
Ghadge, presently posted in Akola district, has leveled allegations of corruption against Singh and some other officers when Singh was Thane police commissioner.
Singh pressurised him to drop the names of some persons from a case and when he refused, he was framed up in false cases, Ghadge claimed.