Kerala’s Congress-led UDF Government on Friday told the High Court that there was no need for a CBI probe into the controversial incident of alleged trafficking of hundreds of children from other States into Muslim orphanages in Kozhikode and Malappuram district as the Kerala Police was effectively investigating the incident.
Advocate General KP Dandapani told the High Court that a CBI probe into the incident was irrelevant at this point of time as an investigation by the State police’s Crime Branch was progressing. He also submitted a detailed report on the progress of the Crime Branch to the court attaching the details of the investigations it had held in other States.
The Advocate General also told the court that the incident would not come under the purview of the Juvenile Justice Act as per the report of the police. According to the report, there was no evidence to show that the children had been subjected to exploitation or physical torture in the orphanages. He assured the court that the Juvenile Justice Act would be implemented strictly.
The case pertains to the alleged trafficking of nearly 500 children from Jharkhand, Bihar and West Bengal to the orphanages run by Muslim managements at Mukkom in Kozhikode district and Vettathur in Malappuram district. Neither the children nor those who were accompanying them had any documents authorising their inter-state transfer.
The police had on May 24 detained the children at the Palakkad railway station as they were being brought to Kerala by train. Ten persons were arrested in connection with the incident and the police had registered a case for human trafficking. However, the Kerala Government took a position that the incident could not be seen as human trafficking.
On Friday, the High Court asked the CBI to file a detailed report to it including information on probes into any such incident the agency had carried out in other States. The court had on June 19 proposed a CBI probe into the matter mainly because of its inter-state connections and the agency had on July 2 expressed its readiness to take over the investigation.
Meanwhile, the police in Kozhikode on Friday detained 30 children who had come to Kerala from West Bengal with their families on the suspicion that they had been brought by some agencies to be engaged in child labour. The families said they were brought into Kerala by an agency named Hira for work in the construction sector and that the children were not brought for child labour but they had come with them.