New Delhi: Stating that “accountability needs to be fixed”, the special court on Friday recommended a departmental inquiry against the CBI’s investigating officer (IO) while discharging all 23 accused in the liquor policy case.Special Judge Jitendra Singh flagged the “glaring lapses” in the investigation and noted that the “duty of the court is not merely to discount the tainted investigative material, but also to recommend initiation of appropriate departmental proceedings against the erring investigating officer (IO) for framing accused 1 (Kuldeep Singh) as an accused”.

Singh, an official of the excise department, was one of the persons discharged, along with former chief minister Arvind Kejriwal and deputy CM Sisodia, among others.The court said the CBI’s case stood exposed as “demonstrably erroneous, economically illiterate and legally unsustainable”, and an inquiry was needed “so that accountability is fixed and the institutional credibility of the investigative machinery is preserved”.Rapping the conduct of the IO, the court said it was “constrained to observe that such a course of action reduces the investigative process to a self-serving exercise, where legal technicalities are invoked not to uncover the truth, but to shield investigative lapses and to construct a post-facto defence in the event that suppression or distortion of material facts is exposed during judicial scrutiny. Such conduct amounts to a conscious abuse of official position and strikes at the very core of the criminal justice system”.