In a significant ruling, the Supreme Court has held that no prior sanction is required by the investigating agency to probe the role of accused persons whose names might have cropped up subsequent to the probe launched against the originally named accused in the first information report.
"There is no hard and fast rule that the first information report must always contain the names of all accused persons who were involved in the commission of an offence," the apex court said while upholding the investigations launched under the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act against an alleged Chotta Rajan gang member.
The bench cancelled the bail of the accused and petitioner Vinod G Asrani and directed him to forthwith surrender before the special judge dealing with MCOCA cases.
The apex court passed the direction while dismissing the accused's appeal seeking a quash of the FIR registered against him on the ground that prior sanction as required under Section 23 (1) (a) of the act was not obtained by the government.
Asrani who was booked for being an intermediary in the extortion racket reportedly run by Chotta Rajan, claimed that inclusion of his name subsequent to the registration of the FIR was illegal as the act clearly stipulated that prior sanction of the government was necessary to include the names of the accused.
A division bench of the Bombay high court rejected his arguments following which he appealed before the apex court.
Declining to interfere with the high court's order, the bench agreed with the Maharashtra government's contention that information given to the investigating authorities regarding a cognisable offence as per Section 154 CrPC did not always contain the names of all the accused persons connected with the alleged offence.
Maharashtra through senior counsel Altaf Ahmed had argued that during investigations names of many other accused crop up and hence, there was nothing wrong in the investigating agency including additional names in the list of accused.
Moreover, Ahmed submitted that Section 23 (2) of the act empowered the agency to include additional names for the purpose of investigation after obtaining the necessary sanction from the police commissioner; which was complied with in the present case.
Agreeing with the submission that there was no breach of statutory provisions, the bench observed, "very often names of the culprits are not even mentioned in the FIR and they surface only at the stage of the investigation."
Accordingly, it dismissed the appeal and concurred with the high court's reasoning that the accused will have sufficient opportunity to contest his involvement in the case before the special court.