India’s Supreme Court on May 20 set aside the conviction of a Sri Lankan national who had spent years in custody under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act after investigators wrongly linked him to an absconding suspect in an alleged Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam conspiracy case.
A three-judge bench of Justices Vikram Nath, Sandeep Mehta and Vijay Bishnoi ruled that lower courts erred in treating Ranjan as the same person as a fugitive accused identified only as Sri. The prosecution’s case rested on belated witness testimony and no test identification parade was conducted after his 2021 arrest.
The court said investigators from Tamil Nadu’s Q Branch appeared to have assigned another man’s identity to Ranjan to close a long-running probe. It criticized what it called inaction in tracing the actual absconding suspect and ordered Ranjan’s immediate release from a special camp in Trichy.
Ranjan had been sentenced to five years in 2024 after a trial court conviction upheld by the Madras High Court in April 2025. The bench granted him liberty to pursue relocation to Switzerland, where his wife and son live. The ruling underscored the high stakes of identity proof in terrorism prosecutions under India’s stringent anti-terror law.
The Supreme Court noted that a person wanted as an absconding accused in a serious UAPA matter would be unlikely to apply to a foreign embassy for a visa while living under scrutiny in India. Witnesses who implicated Ranjan had themselves used forged identity documents, the bench observed, casting doubt on the investigation’s integrity.
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Sources:
https://www.livelaw.in/supreme-court