The voice of retired Orissa High Court Judge I.M. Quddusi has been authenticated in the phone call recordings submitted by the CBI in connection with the medical college bribery scandal.
The Central Forensic Science Laboratory (CFSL) matched the voice in the telephonic conversations recorded by the CBI with the voice samples of Quddusi, reports said.
The CBI had relied on 80 telephonic conversations between Quddusi and the co-accused in its charge-sheet. Quddusi’s voice samples were taken to ascertain their authenticity in the audio recordings.
The conversations refer to bribe money as “prasad (offering), gamla (pot), ped (tree), aadmi (man), samaan (goods)”, and speaks of Quddusi meeting “number 1” in the Apex Court to discuss the case related to the medical institute.
The CBI charged Quddusi and others in an alleged case of bribery to obtain a favourable order from the Apex Court.
A local court had rejected Quddusi’s plea seeking the CBI to furnish a copy of the “waveform & spectrographic analysis” of his voice sample. The court said the analysis cannot be shared at this juncture since the CBI doesn’t have a copy of the same in its possession.
However, the Court has given Quddusi the liberty to call for analysis when the CFSL expert steps into the witness box during the trial.
Advocate Vijay Aggarwal had contended that the “waveform & spectrographic analysis” of his voice sample was essential to test the veracity of the CFSL expert’s report.
The CBI manual does not permit the agency to retain documents after the completion of the investigation, Aggarwal averred.
The CBI opposed the request arguing that Quddusi was attempting to seek a “fishing & roving inquiry” through the plea.
The Court held that “only a vague & bald assertion” has been made by Quddusi seeking a “disclosure of all the unrelied documents”, the accused is required to specifically state which documents or statements of witnesses have not been supplied to him.
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