Govt yet to study Somasekhara Commission report

Mangalore, September 22: Christian youths facing criminal cases in the aftermath of attacks on churches in September 2008 will have to wait for some time before cases against them are dropped. The state government that set up the Justice B K Somasekhara Commission of Inquiry to go into the issues that led to the attacks and incidents thereafter is yet to take a view on the report, said S M Jaamdar, principal home secretary.

The law department is examining the inquiry commission report, Jaamdar told reporters here on Wednesday. We have received various representations (from Christian organizations) urging the state government to withdraw cases filed against Christians, he said adding the home department could take forward the process once the government takes a view on the report. The question of processing files to drop the cases will be taken up thereafter, he said.

Karnataka which presently has a cyber crime police station in Bangalore will get three more __ in Mangalore, Hubli and Mysore. The state government around a fortnight ago received guidelines from the Union government to set up these cyber police stations given the increase in white collar crimes, he said, adding that the state government would forward the proposal received from DGP-CID to the Union government within a week.

After a rap on the knuckles from the State Government on failure to serve non-bailable arrest warrants on the Reddy brothers, Jaamdar said the state government has issued guidelines 15-days ago deputing one lower level police personnel at every court who would monitor the process and coordinate with jurisdictional police stations. It is time that a separate process serving wing was set up either under the judiciary or home department for this, he said.

The Forensic Science Laboratory, Bangalore, is being modernised at a cost of Rs 3 crore this year. This entails purchase of automatic fingerprint identification system, computer programme for graphology and state of the art equipment to deal with serology tests. The DNA Centre in Bangalore is now self-sufficient and its dependence of Hyderabad-based Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) has come down, Jaamdar noted.