A statement made by an accused in police custody is admissible under Section 27, Evidence Act, if it is a necessary preliminary to the fact thereby discovered, irrespective of whether the statement is sufficient to enable the police to make the discovery by themselves or requires further assistance of the accused.

Falshaw, J.

1. This is a State appeal against the acquittal of Lehna Singh respondent who was convicted by a Magistrate at Ludhiana under Section 19, Arms Act and sentenced to three months rigorous imprisonment but was acquitted in appeal by the Additional Sessions Judge.

2. The facts of the case are quite simple, the story being that in consequence of information that the accused was keeping an unlicensed rifle, Assistant Sub-Inspector Santokh Singh of the Arms Staff went to the village of the accused, who, after being questioned, admitted that he had concealed a rifle in a manure heap lying outside one of the walls of his house and thereafter took out the rifle P-1 from underneath the manure heap. The recovery was supported by the evidence of Harcharan Singh and Rattan Singh P. Ws.

3. The accused denied his guilt but offered no explanation of the case against him and produced two witnesses of ordinary type who denied that any rifle was recovered from the possession of or through the agency of the accused. The evidence of these witnesses certainly could not influence the decision of the case one way or the other, and in fact it has not been relied on even by the learned Additional Sessions Judge in acquitting the accused.

4. The reason for the acquittal was that the learned Judge followed a decision of my Lord the Chief Justice in CM Revn No 883 of 1951. The facts in that case were not in any essential particular different from those of the present case, the accused having apparently made a somewhat similar statement to the police when questioned and then led the police to a field from which he dug up a pistol. In the present case it appears that Sunder Singh, the father of the accused, resides in the house outside which the rifle was recovered from a manure heap, and in the other case the field from which the pistol was recovered belonged to the father of the accused and his uncles. On those facts it was found by my Lord the Chief Justice that all that was proved was that the accused knew where the pistol was lying and that it might have belonged to some other member of the family. The case of possession of the weapon could only be proved against the accused if the statement made by him to the police were believed and also found to be admissible in evidence. The question of the admissibility of the statement was simply dealt with as follows :

"The previous statement made by him to the Assistant Sub-Inspector was not admissible in evidence. That was not a statement leading to the discovery but merely a statement antecedent to the discovery. The discovery was made by the accused himself."

Applying this passage, which was quoted verbatim, to the present case, the learned Additional Sessions Judge came to the conclusion that the statement alleged to have been made by the accused was not admissible and that without it the case against him was not established. It is contended on behalf of the State by the learned Assistant Advocate-General that the observations of my Lord the Chief Justice do not represent a correct statement of the law contained in Section 27, Evidence Act which reads : "Provided that, when any fact is deposed to as discovered in consequence of information received from a person accused of any offence, in the custody of a police officer, so much of such information, whether it amounts to a confession or not, as relates distinctly to the fact thereby discovered, may be proved."

It would certainly appear to me to be taking a very narrow view of the meaning of the words "discovered in consequence of information" to hold that when an accused says that he has hidden a certain object in a certain place, and then takes the police there and produces the object from the hiding place, the recovery is not in consequence of the statement, since it is clear that without the statement there would be no recovery. According to this narrow view the statement would be admissible only if, after the accused had made it, the