The survivor in the actor assault case of 2017 has moved a petition to the High Court of Kerala seeking directions to issue a copy of the investigation report on illegal access of the memory card that contained visuals of the attack on her.
In December 2023, the High Court had ordered an enquiry into the alleged leak of the visuals after the survivor brought up the issue of illegal access of the memory card, which happened thrice, while it was in the custody of different courts. The third time it happened, the memory card was in the custody of the trial court hearing the actor assault case. The same court -- the Ernakulam District and Sessions court -- was asked to investigate the survivor's allegations by the High Court.
However, in the new petition filed in February 2024, the survivor said that she had not received a copy of the investigation report that was submitted by the trial court to the High Court.
On December 7 last year, High Court judge K Babu acknowledged the illegal access of the memory card, pronouncing that "we failed to protect the victim's interest, which resulted in the violation of her fundamental constitutional right."
Read: Memory card with visuals of Kerala actor's assault was illegally accessed thrice
The State Forensic Science Laboratory had found that the illegal access had happened on three occasions - January 9 and December 13 of 2018, and July 19, 2021. On the last occasion, the prime accused in the actor assault case, Pulsar Suni, was permitted to inspect the visuals in the trial court. However, this was done at a different time of the day than when the visuals were accessed, and using a different device, not the memory card. The unauthorised access was done using a Vivo mobile phone with Android system, which also contained applications like Whatsapp, Instagram and Telegram that could be used to leak the visuals.
The survivor had earlier petitioned the High Court to investigate the unauthorised access and find out the owner of the Vivo phone.
In 2017, after actor Dileep was accused as the mastermind of the assault, he had demanded a copy of the memory card. Although he was allowed to watch the visuals in court premises in the presence of his counsel in December 2017, he was not permitted a copy of the memory card.