Aji Bright, a 40-year-old man from Kerala’s Thiruvananthapuram, was arrested in July 2015 along with 30 others in the Idamalayar elephant poaching case. After his arrest, Forest officials allegedly assaulted him repeatedly in custody, threatened him not to talk about it in court, and threw him in jail. Recently, when he came out on bail, he says the Enforcement Directorate (ED), which deals with economic crimes, summoned him, although they haven’t divulged the reason.
Aji, has been named as a main link in an ivory smuggling racket in south India.
In August 2015, Aji had filed a custodial torture complaint against then District Forest Officer (DFO) T Uma, her husband R Kamalahar, who is an Indian Forest Service (IFS) officer, and a few forest officials whom he can identify.
Aji says he was taken into custody by forest officials from the Sreekaryam police station and taken to the Forest Department headquarters in Vazhuthacaud. “When I reached there, a well-built officer was called in to “handle” me. They tortured me physically for 18 hours.
Aji says he was taken for the procedural medical check-up before being produced before the magistrate to record his arrest. The doctor, however, reportedly did not mention anything about the injuries in the report. When he was produced in court, Aji did not speak a word about the torture because he alleges that one of his close friends, who had come to sign his bail papers, was in the custody of officials.
Once he was moved to jail, he spotted bloodstains in his urine and was bedridden for a few days. Then he was shifted to a hospital in Muvattupuzha, where a doctor first prepared a report on his custodial torture. According to the report, Aji’s backbone was severely damaged, forcing him to wear a lumbar spine belt permanently. Five years after the incident, Aji is still unable to walk due to spinal injuries.
Three weeks after the incident, Aji was released on bail and filed a complaint against the officers for assaulting him. The Crime Branch registered a case against the two IFS officers and a few other officers whom Aji could identify. The IFS couple were booked for inflicting grievous hurt under sections 323, 324 and 326 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).
In 2016, the Forest Department charged him in a number of poaching cases. Aji was in jail from 2016 and released on bail in 2019. In early 2020, based on his complaint, the Crime Branch scheduled an identification parade for him to identify the officers he alleged had tortured him in custody.
That is when he got the summons from ED to appear at their Kochi office in October 2020.
The IFS officers did not attend the identification process, citing health issues.