The Madras High Court on Wednesday, June 26, 2024, granted time till July 3 for the Tamil Nadu government to file a status report on the steps taken by the police to investigate the Kallakurichi hooch tragedy that has so far claimed 63 lives and left many others hospitalised.
Acting Chief Justice (ACJ) R. Mahadevan and Justice Mohammed Shaffiq accepted a request made by Advocate General P.S. Raman to grant him a week’s time to file the report in response to two cases seeking a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) probe.
AIADMK legal wing secretary I.S. Inbadurai and PMK advocate K. Balu had filed the two public interest litigation petitions. Senior Counsel V. Raghavachari and N.L. Rajah appeared on behalf of the petitioners.
Opposing the plea for a CBI probe into the tragedy, the A-G told the court that the Crime Branch-Criminal Investigation Department (CB-CID) had done a speedy investigation, arrested the main culprits and even found the source of methanol used in the spurious liquor.
However, Mr. Raghavachari complained that hooch tragedies were not new to the State and that it had been witnessing a number of deaths during regular intervals due to the consumption of spurious liquor and yet, such incidents continued to be reported year after year.
Blaming the “shoddy” investigation done by the State police for the recurrence of such incidents, the senior counsel said, the CB-CID had investigated the 1998 hooch tragedy but all the accused persons walked free from the case in 2018. He said, such ineffective prosecution must be questioned by the court.
On his part, Mr. Rajah said, an investigation would be effective only if it was carried out at the earliest, and therefore, his client’s request for a probe either by a Special Investigation Team (SIT) or the CBI need not be prolonged for long by granting long adjournments.
At this point, the ACJ intervened to state that the court would certainly direct the investigating agency concerned to complete the probe in a time-bound manner and decided to wait for the State government’s status report before passing further orders.
