On a cold January night in Delhi this year, a European national was gang raped. According to reports the next day, the violent crime took place a stone’s throw from central Connaught Place and continued for three hours until the woman escaped to her hotel in Paharganj and filed a police complaint.

Ignoring the advice of the police and embassy officials, she refused to take a medical test and left the country the following morning. This left the investigating officers in a peculiar spot.

They had a first information report about the crime from the victim. They had also managed to track down the suspects, but had no way to prove in court that the victim or the perpetrators were at the scene of crime.

To help break this logjam, one of the investigating officers approached Truthlabs, a newly opened private forensics lab in Delhi.

A writing puzzle

“They came to us with a book (planner) belonging to the victim that they had recovered on information given by one of the accused,” Chetan Kumar, a former CBI officer employed with Truthlabs, told us when we met him at the forensic lab in the residential Safdarjung Enclave in south Delhi. “In criminal cases, even if an accused confessed to it, it will not be admissible in court. The police are obligated to prove with evidence that the person was actually at the crime scene and had committed the act.” In this case, the forensic lab’s task was to see if the handwriting in the book matched with that in the FIR. That, in turn, would prove the book belonged to the victim and place both the accused and the victim squarely at the scene of crime.

Handwriting experts examined the documents — namely, the victim’s handwritten complaint and the planner with some writing in it. Examining the alphabets, the experts observed that the movement and location of the diagonal strokes in the lower case ‘m’ and ‘n’, as well as the movement of their ‘shoulders’ and directions matched in both documents. Other similarities included the downward location of the lower case ‘v’ and the distinctive anti-clockwise movement of the text. “We had to be 100 per cent sure. If someone is forging, it might look a little too similar to the original document... we were able to ascertain that the person who wrote in the planner and the one who filed the FIR were the same, hence placing both parties at the scene of crime.”

Interestingly, Truthlabs gave its report within a week, whereas State forensic labs have been known to take more than a year or two for similar cases.

A Hyderabad story

Truthlabs was first opened in Hyderabad in 2007 by KPC Gandhi, a former inspector general of police and director of Andhra Pradesh Forensic Science Lab. Branches have since opened in Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Bangalore. “Forensic labs are either with the state or central government most of the time, and their services are not available to the general public and other institutions apart from the courts and the police,” explains Gandhi. “This made me think of starting Truthlabs. Those who have faith in forensic science can approach us to settle their problems or ask for help in detection.”

Truthlabs has so far served a diverse range of clients, including the police in several states, law firms, insurance companies, banks, private corporations and individual cases. Its reports are admissible in many courts across the country, giving it an additional edge. Its services span cyber crime detection, DNA profiling, medico-legal consultancy among others.

Truthlabs receives, on an average, 150 cases each month across its centres, and has so far helped solve more than 7,000 cases. Under an MoU signed recently with the Delhi state forensic labs, some pending case files will be outsourced to it.

Even as he readies to expand his services to more centres, Gandhi says, “Forensics is a service that should be available to anyone who seeks it. Importantly, there is no point in detecting and delivering results after three or four years, as no justice can come out of that. It is a gap we are working to close.”

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