Probe into Anara’s detention, cops lodge ‘open’ FIR

In apparent admission that former Miss Jammu Anara Gupta was kept in illegal detention at the women’s police station for over a week, t...

In apparent admission that former Miss Jammu Anara Gupta was kept in illegal detention at the women’s police station for over a week, the state crime branch today registered an ‘‘open’’ FIR and started investigations to fix responsibility in the matter.

Though crime branch officials were tightlipped on the matter, sources said the FIR came following instructions from state DGP Gopal Sharma, who has already been asked by the state HC to file an affidavit on the whereabouts of the former beauty queen from October 24 to November 3, 2004. The DGP is understood to have issued instructions for formal registration of a case in the matter in view of representations by Anara’s family members to the President, Union ministers and the National Commission for Women (NCW).

The crime branch has already sought the court’s permission to close the porn CDs case against the former beauty queen, saying there was prima facie no evidence against her. The prayer to close the case had followed a report by a Hyderabad forensic laboratory that the girl featuring in the porn CD was not Anara Gupta.

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Investigations into Gupta’s illegal detention comes at a time when police is already contemplating to book her in another case. Sources said a case has already been registered at Bari Brahmana police station on the seizure of porn CDs. Though the FIR with Bari Brahmana police does not mention the name of the former beauty queen, the police had sent her photographs along with the seized CDs to a Chandigarh-based laboratory for matching. The laboratory had, early this month, certified that a number of facial features of the girl in the porn CD matched with those of Gupta.

To further substantiate its case against the girl, the police has reportedly sent another porn CD to a laboratory in Gujarat. The report is awaited.