The court established the authority of the Police Officer to arrest under S. 151 based on reliable information of a design to commit cognisable offences, and the authority of the Magistrate to authorize detention under S. 167 for effective investigation, irrespective of the nature of the arrest.

Petitioners are accused 1 to 6 in Crime No. 77/1959 registered at the Chalakudi Police Station. They were arrested under S. 151 of the Code of Criminal Procedure by the Inspector in charge of that station. The arrest was on 18-06-1956 and on the next day they were produced before the First Class Magistrate at Chalakudi with a request that they may be remanded to custody pending investigation of the case registered against them. The Magistrate passed an order remanding them to custody for a period of 14 days. On behalf of the petitioners an application was filed before the Magistrate challenging the legality of their arrest by the Inspector of Police and also of that Magistrate's order remanding them to custody. The Magistrate dismissed that application. The present revision petition is directed against that order.

2. The circumstances under which a Police Officer may arrest a person without a warrant from a Magistrate are enumerated in Sec. 54 if the Code of Criminal Procedure. This section contains the general provisions authorising such arrest. The arrest of the petitioners on 18-6-1959 was not under any of the conditions specified in Sec. 54. Over and above the power conferred by that section, a special power has been conferred by Sec. 151 of the Code of Criminal Procedure to arrest a person without orders of a Magistrate or without warrant.

This section occurs in Chapter XIII of the Code dealing with preventive action by the Police Sec. 151 states that

''Police Officer knowing a design to commit any cognisable offence may arrest, without orders from a Magistrate and without a warrant, the person so designing, if it appears to such officer that the commission of the offence cannot be otherwise prevented".

The conditions to be satisfied by this section are that the Police Officer must have knowledge that the person concerned has a design or plan to commit a cognisable offence and that the Police Officer must be satisfied that the commission of such offence cannot be prevented except by the arrest of the person. As pointed out in In re, Om Prakash Gupta, AIR 1949 Mad 744, it is essentially a matter of satisfaction of the Police Officer himself that the two conditions mentioned above do really exist in a given case so as to justify action being taken under Sec. 151. Such action had to be taken immediately, as otherwise the object of the section would be defeated. The correctness of the knowledge of the Police Officer as to the design of a person to commit cognisable offence cannot ordinarily be scrutinised by the Court. Similarly, the court cannot substitute its own opinion in place of the opinion of the Police Officer on the question whether the commission of the offence could be prevented by some means other than the arrest of the person designing to commit such offence.

In the present case, there is the affidavit of the Police Officer to show that he had reliable information of a design by the petitioners to attack and destroy the police outpost and other Government buildings and also to destroy the toddy shops at Chalakudi and that he was satisfied that the commission of such cognisable offences could be prevented only by the arrest of the petitioners. Prima facie, there is nothing to indicate that these averments were baseless or false. Under these circumstances, the arrest of the petitioners under Sec. 151 was perfectly legal and the Magistrate was right in refusing to interfere with that arrest.

3. The next question for consideration is whether the Magistrate's order remanding the accused to custody for 14 days was illegal. Section 61 of the Code of Criminal Procedure contains a mandatory provision that a person arrested without warrant should not be detained in Police custody for more than 24 hours without obtaining a special order from a Magistrate under Sec. 167. Sub-Section (1) of Sec. 167 states that where it is felt that the investigation of the case taken up against the arrested person cannot be completed withi