JNU footage is authentic: CBI

A forensic examination of raw video footage of the February 9 JNU event, in connection with which a sedition case was registered against JNUSU president Kanhaiya Kumar and two others, has been found to be “authentic” by the CBI forensic lab, the police claimed on Saturday.

The raw footage, obtained from a Hindi news channel, was sent to the CBI forensic lab for examination along with the camera, memory card, a CD containing the clip, wires and other equipment, they said. “The CBI lab sent a report to Delhi police’s special cell on June 8 saying the raw footage was authentic,” a police source said. Special commissioner of police (special cell) Arvind Deep confirmed receiving the report but did not divulge its details.

The police had claimed in the FIR that in the video a group of students, led by JNU student Umar Khalid, could be seen raising anti-India slogans, 21 of which were mentioned in an interim report filed a few days later. Kanhaiya Kumar, Umar Khalid and Anirban Bhattacharya were arrested in February and later granted bail. The case is now being probed by Delhi police’s anti-terrorism unit special cell.

Earlier, the Delhi police had sent four video clips of the event to the Gandhinagar-based Central Forensic Science Laboratory (CFSL) which, in its report in May, had said that they were genuine. But a Delhi government-ordered probe into a set of seven video clippings of the controversial event sent to the Hyderabad-based Truth Labs had found two clips to be manipulated and the others genuine.

The police, however, maintained that the FIR was registered on the basis of raw video footage obtained from a news channel on a CD, and not on the clippings aired on TV channels.

“The video footage showed that under the leadership of Umar Khalid, people in the gathering had been raising anti-national slogans such as ‘Kitne Afzal maaroge, ghar ghar se Afzal niklenge’ and ‘Pakistan Zindabad’,” the FIR said of the footage sent to CFSL in February.

A senior police official said that after confirmation of authenticity, they could proceed further with strong evidence against the protesters who shouted slogans. Meanwhile, legal experts say that despite the video footage confirming that anti-national slogans were raised, it will not amount to sedition as no violence was reported.