The Supreme Court has decided that two police officers accused in the custodial deaths of a man and his son in Tamil Nadu, which outraged the nation, will not be granted bail.
The officers are from the Sattankulam police station in Tamil Nadu, where P Jeyaraj and his son J Bennicks died in police custody in June 2020, allegedly after being tortured for a long time.
P Raghu Ganesh and S Sridhar were denied bail by a two-judge bench of Justices Vineet Saran and Dinesh Maheshwari. "Not at this stage," Justice Vineet Saran said, dismissing the petitions.
During the lockdown on June 19, last year(2020), Jayaraj and Bennicks were arrested on the charge of keeping their mobile phone shop open past the permitted hours.
Following their death in custody on June 22, 2021, the Tamil Nadu Government delegated the investigation to the CBI, which charged nine police officers.
According to the central investigative agency's charge sheet, the men were tortured for more than six hours by police officers who "wanted to teach them a lesson" about how to interact with cops.
"Our investigation revealed that the father-son duo was arrested on the evening of June 19 and was allegedly tortured at the Sathankulam police station by the accused in the evening as well as the intervening night, as a result of which both of them succumbed to the injuries and died in the intervening night of June 22,2021 and June 23,2021 ," the agency said.
"Whenever there was a lull, accused inspector Sridhar used to prod the staff by asking about reasons for silence, instigating them further to start new rounds of beating," the charge sheet read.
