Bengaluru police have rearrested a life-term convict who allegedly spent nearly six years outside prison after officials accepted a forged Supreme Court release order, exposing a serious breakdown in the verification of high-stakes judicial documents at Parappana Agrahara Central Prison.
Shankar A, a mason, was serving a life sentence at the Bengaluru prison for the 2004 kidnapping and murder of a minor boy from Chickpet for ransom. His wife, Lakshmi, who was also convicted, was later released after serving a reduced sentence because of her limited role in the abduction, according to the report.
The alleged fraud surfaced in November 2018, when prison authorities received documents appearing to direct Shankar’s immediate release. The paperwork was presented as an order from the Supreme Court. Prison officials processed it and allowed Shankar to leave the facility without independently confirming whether the apex court had issued such an order.
Police allege that Srikanth, a First Division Assistant at the central prison, prepared the forged order after promising Lakshmi that he could secure her husband’s release in return for money. Investigators said he intercepted an actual Supreme Court order concerning the release of a long-serving inmate in Tamil Nadu and edited it by replacing the details with Shankar’s information.
The forged document was then sent from Shivajinagar Post Office using the pseudonym of an advocate, according to the police account. The document’s legal formatting, typography and postmarks allegedly helped it resemble an official judicial communication. Senior prison officials accepted it without completing the verification checks that would have established whether the Supreme Court had issued a release direction for Shankar.
After leaving prison, Shankar initially lived in Jnanabharati in Bengaluru and later settled at his residence in Mysuru. The alleged release remained undetected for almost six years. The matter began receiving attention after an anonymous petition reached a senior prison official in January. The report said the initial warning may have been intercepted or suppressed, while further whistleblower complaints continued to circulate.
A second petition submitted in May to Alok Kumar, Director General of Police, Prisons and Correctional Services, prompted an internal inquiry. A team from Parappana Agrahara prison travelled to the Supreme Court in New Delhi and checked the relevant records with the Assistant Registrar. The registrar confirmed that no release order had been issued for Shankar, according to the report.
Following that confirmation, police registered a first information report at Parappana Agrahara police station under provisions relating to forgery, fabrication and criminal conspiracy. Police later raided Shankar’s Mysuru residence, arrested him and returned him to judicial custody. Srikanth was also arrested for allegedly drafting and mailing the forged order.
Deputy Commissioner of Police (Electronic City) M. Narayana said Srikanth had forged the apex court’s order and mailed it from a local post office to bypass verification checks. “We are currently probing the exact financial transaction between Srikanth and Shankar’s wife,” Narayana said, according to the report.
The case has placed the prison department’s document-handling process under scrutiny. The reported lapse involved not only the creation and dispatch of a false court order but also its acceptance by prison officials and the failure to detect the irregularity for nearly six years. The police investigation and the departmental inquiry are expected to establish how the document moved through the release process and whether other officials were involved.
