New Delhi: Acquitting a Sri Lankan accused of conspiring to revive the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the Supreme Court Wednesday ruled that investigators had arrested the wrong man who was “falsely implicated” just “to close the case”, casting “serious doubt” on their conduct.
A three-judge bench of Justices Vikram Nath, Sandeep Mehta, and Vijay Bishnoi set aside convictions returned by a trial court and upheld by the Madras High Court, and ordered the man’s immediate release from a Special Camp in Trichy. The bench cleared him to pursue relocation to Switzerland, where his wife and son live.
The case dates to a 2015 FIR registered by the Q Branch in Ramanathapuram, Tamil Nadu.
Q Branch falls under Tamil Nadu Police Criminal Investigation Department (CID). The FIR alleged a conspiracy had been hatched at a Trichy bakery to “rejuvenate the banned LTTE”.
According to the prosecution, a suspect identified only as “Sri” had handed over 75 cyanide capsules and a chemical compound called GPS-4 to a co-conspirator, to be smuggled into Sri Lanka for the purpose of eliminating rival Tamil leaders. LTTE was the separatist outfit that fought to carve out an independent Tamil state, Tamil Eelam, in northern and eastern Sri Lanka.
Several accused in the case were arrested and convicted in 2018. But “Sri” was declared absconding, and the investigation remained open on his whereabouts for over five years.
On 16 December 2021, Q Branch police executed a non-bailable warrant against Ranjan, claiming he was “Sri”. Ranjan denied this accusation from the outset.
In July 2024, a trial court sentenced him to five years of rigorous imprisonment under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act and other charges. The Madras High Court upheld that conviction in April 2025.
Ranjan, a Sri Lankan refugee living in Trichy, subsequently approached the Supreme Court.
The three-judge SC bench found that the prosecution could not prove its most basic obligation: that Ranjan and “Sri” were the same person.
No Test Identification Parade–when an eyewitness’s ability to identify a suspect is tested from a line-up of similar individuals–had been conducted, the bench noted. More tellingly, the court said, the name “Ranjan” did not appear in any of the original police records, FIRs or chargesheets linked to the conspiracy; it surfaced only after the man’s arrest in 2021.
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The witnesses: Forged papers, belated memory
The top court’s sharpest scrutiny fell on the two primary prosecution witnesses, both Sri Lankan refugees who admitted to living in India on forged identity documents—Aadhaar and PAN cards. Both had testified in the earlier trials of other LTTE conspirators, yet neither had mentioned the name “Ranjan” nor identified the accused as “Sri” in the earlier cases, the bench noted.
The identification came only years later.
Police had argued in court that the issues related to the prosecution witnesses were “trivial in nature, immaterial, and such as are bound to occur in the testimony of truthful witnesses, looking to the long interval of time after which they were examined”.
The bench declined to attribute this to lapse of memory. Instead, it characterised the change as “material improvement”—testimony that grows more specific over time in a manner that signals fabrication rather than recollection.
The court went further, inferring that the two witnesses—themselves under scrutiny for their illegal status in India—may have been pressured into naming Ranjan to give investigators a clean closure on a case that had remained open too long.
“It appears that (the witnesses)… were, by way of a bargain, prevailed upon to implicate the appellant (Ranjan) in the present case as the absconding accused ‘Sri’ (A-5), just in order to give a closure to the case,” the ruling said.
Why would UAPA accused seek police clearance?
Among the most striking elements of the judgment was the court’s reference to Ranjan’s transparent conduct as evidence of his innocence.
Since arriving in India in 2009, Ranjan had lived at a known address in Trichy for over a decade, registering openly as a “non-camp refugee” with local police stations, the top court noted.
Just before his arrest, he had been actively pursuing a Swiss visa—a process that required him to seek police clearance from the very station whose officers would subsequently brand him absconding.
“A person who is an absconding accused in a serious UAPA matter would not dare to apply to a foreign embassy for a visa and seek a police clearance certificate from the very police station in whose jurisdiction he admittedly resided under a false identity,” it said.
An indictment
The Supreme Court bench criticised Q Branch for “inaction and indolence” in failing to trace the actual suspect “Sri” and for instead “assigning the identity of another person” to Ranjan.
“We are of the firm opinion that the appellant has been falsely implicated in this case without there being any evidence to connect him with the crime,” the bench said, setting aside the judgments of both lower courts.
Ranjan was ordered released immediately, and the court said explicitly that he is “at liberty to pursue his request for relocation/movement to Switzerland” in accordance with the law.
(Edited by Prerna Madan)
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