Soon after techie Kumar Ajitabh went missing on December 18 last year, the Bengaluru police got in touch with Google India.
Google India directed them to Google US, and then nothing happened.
The case has confounded his family: Ajitabh went out to sell his Maruti Ciaz car after advertising it on OLX, and vanished after he set out to meet potential buyers on the outskirts of Bengaluru. The family has been trying to get the files moving. Ajitabh’s brother-in-law Mimic Zadoo says, “If OLX is subjected to Section 91, why aren’t Google and Whatsapp being subjected to it?”
The Indian law, under Section 91 of the Criminal Procedure Code, allows the summoning of any official in possession of a document necessary for investigation.
Zadoo says he had applied for a mutual legal assistance treaty (MLAT) request in December, but it took the officials seven months to send the request across to the Google and Whatsapp offices. The MLAT is signed between two countries for gathering and exchanging information to enforce criminal laws. A court handed over the case to the Central Bureau of Investigation, on October 21.
The case was initially handled by the state police and later handed over to the City Crime Branch, and then to the CID. It is now with the CBI, which registered an FIR on November 20. Zadoo, who works in the IT sector in Delhi, says the CID showed no results despite the family’s best efforts.
“I gave the CID many leads which they did not follow. Nobody visited the place where the incident took place. The court’s hearing was on hold only because of the delay in CID investigations,” he says.
The family is now happy the case is with a central investigation agency. “If the CBI had taken over the case earlier, the results would have been different,” he says.
Story so far
Ajitabh goes missing: December 18, 2017.
Missing complaint filed three days later.
Little progress for close to a year.
CBI takes over case this week.