Listen to this article:

This story was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center.

New Delhi: In the hours of a March morning in 2020, Ali’s* life changed forever – and AI-powered facial recognition technology was at the centre of why.

Ali was arrested from the narrow alleys of Chand Bagh – a poor locality in Northeast Delhi. What followed was more than four and a half years of pre-trial incarceration. Trapped in a muddle of legal delays and procedural limbo, he waited as his case crept through the Indian judicial system until he was finally granted bail.

“I was beaten mercilessly; on some occasions, the assault was so severe that there was profuse bleeding and my flesh was torn. They used batons against me, and there were times I was kicked so brutally that I struggled to breathe,” he said about those days. The Wire has asked the commissioner of police, Delhi and the secretary, Union Ministry of Home Affairs, to respond to these allegations of custodial torture, but no response had been received till the time of publication.

Ali is one of the 29 accused in the Ratan Lal Murder Case (FIR 60/2020). The case pertains to the communal violence that erupted in Delhi on February 24, 2020, when, according to the police, protestors against the controversial Citizenship (Amendment) Act used sticks, baseball bats, iron rods and stones to attack policemen on Wazirabad Road, Chand Bagh. According to the chargesheet, Head Constable Ratan Lal was struck by a bullet and later succumbed to this injury.

Despite chargesheets asserting the presence of “sufficient material” against several of them, 27 of the 29 accused have been granted bail, and one has been discharged from the case. In the years spent behind bars, with no trial in sight, many, like Ali, have lost loved ones and seen their livelihoods vanish, and now face crushing debt.

The investigating officer of the Ratan Lal Murder Case, Inspector Gurmeet Singh of the Crime Branch, told The Wire that the case was ‘solved’ using advanced technologies, including video and image enhancement tools (Amped FIVE by Amped Software) and facial recognition software (AI Vision by Innefu Labs). He confirmed that all the accused named in FIR 60/2020 were identified using these tools.

Special Public Prosecutor Amit Prasad, who has been representing the Delhi Police, told the Delhi high court during a hearing, “The usage of AMPED software based on digital recognition is sufficient to establish [the identity of] the correct individual.” Though Prasad refused to respond to The Wire’s queries, he confirmed that Amped tools were used by the police.

The police obtained CCTV footage from multiple alleys near the crime scene in Chand Bagh. Additionally, three private videos were submitted by onlookers: Harsh’s* video (1.48 minutes) recorded from Gym Body Fit Garage, Skyride Video (1.37 minutes), and Yamuna Vihar Video (40 seconds).

Defence counsel Raman*, who represented Ali in the Delhi high court, told The Wire that the police obtained CCTV footage from the surrounding alleys and selected frames capturing a full-frontal or even a side-profile view of each accused. He added, “These images were then fed into the facial recognition software and matched against the individuals appearing in the three private videos acquired by the police.”

Raman stated that Ali was ‘identified’ through facial recognition software: “Even the methodology of facial recognition was not disclosed, which is quite surprising. Based on what the prosecution said in court, I gather that the police had CCTV footage of the alleys/gullies near the scene of the crime. They seemed to have extracted images from that footage and matched them against the private videos (like Harsh’s*) using the FRS. Even if I assume that the CCTV footage was correct, I can surely say that the persons in the Harsh* video and the CCTV footage do not match.”

Advocate Raman explains that the person in Harsh’s video, who is seen pelting stones at the police, is wearing a black shirt with a white jacket, while Ali, in the CCTV footage of the main road, is wearing a different coloured shirt and no jacket.* Describing the video, he says, “Furthermore, the Harsh video was a side profile of a person standing far back, rather against the wall. He could not be part of the melee of people conducting a physical attack. But the police allege that Ali threw a stone from roughly 50 to 100 meters away onto the police crowd. Whether the stone landed or caused any injury is neither mentioned nor established.”

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty

Since his arrest, Ali has been battling with severe depression. The toll on his family has been equally devastating. His mother, who weighed around 68 kg in 2020, has withered to just 30–35 kg. Her blood sugar often spikes to critical levels, sometimes reaching as high as 500. Years of poverty and malnutrition in Ali’s absence have caused her to lose all her teeth, and she has now begun experiencing bleeding during urination.

Ali said, “Our financial situation has deteriorated to a point where we cannot even afford basic medical treatment for our mother. We are trapped in a severe financial crisis, burdened by a debt of nearly Rs 20–25 lakh, and it feels as though our lives have been pushed back by at least two decades.”

Speaking to The Wire, he also described systemic discrimination against Muslim prisoners in jail. He alleged that they were routinely humiliated, asked their names, and if identified as Muslim, were assigned degrading tasks. “We were forced to scrub toilets and mop floors with our bare hands, denied even basic cleaning tools like wipers,” he recalled. The abuse extended beyond physical violence. “I was constantly humiliated, called a terrorist, and subjected to unbearable psychological torment. I spent countless days crying and praying – as did my mother,” he alleged.

Speaking about the desperation during the COVID-19 lockdown, Ali explained, “Prisoners would fight for the slightest chance to help unload heavy supply trucks, just to earn 5–7 extra biscuits. The food rations were grossly insufficient – often just 50–100 ml of watery khichdi and two teaspoons of vegetables, barely enough to survive.”

Mohammed* is another accused in the Ratan Lal Murder Case, who, according to his lawyer Advocate Uday*, was also ‘identified’ using facial recognition software. He had to spend around two years behind bars without any trial before he finally walked out on bail. Despite being an undertrial and not yet convicted of any crime, he, like Ali, was also compelled to clean toilets and perform menial labour, even though prison labour for undertrials is supposed to be only voluntary. His bail pleas were rejected not once but four times, even as his wife struggled through a difficult pregnancy and his parents’ health rapidly declined in his absence.

He told The Wire that in one of the videos, the police had ‘identified’ a man as him, even though the individual was at least five inches taller than him, with noticeably different hair length, footwear and even a different number of shirt pockets. The ‘identification,’ he pointed out, hinged primarily on clothing – specifically a white shirt and black pants, an outfit worn by several individuals in the footage. This allegation raises serious concerns about not just the accuracy of the identification but also the efficiency of the tools used.

Advocate Uday took the high court through one of the private video footage collected by the police.. He argued that his client could not be clearly identified as he was not distinctly visible in the footage. Also, the clothes worn by him (white shirt and black pants) were similar to those of many others present in the video, thereby failing to establish his identity at the scene of the crime. Uday also pointed out that no available camera footage captures Mohammed damaging CCTV cameras, contrary to the prosecution’s allegations. He added, “The logo present on [his] white shirt appears in one video and is absent in another. Despite this, the police claimed that the two persons in the videos are the same.”

Both the defence counsels told The Wire that facial recognition was used to ‘identify’ Mohammed and Ali: “No Test Identification Parade (TIP) was conducted for either of them, which means whoever identified them already knew them and their physical description.”

In several cases, while granting bail to the accused, the court observed that both the authenticity of the video footage and the validity of its analysis are issues to be examined during the trial.

Uday contends that since all the accused are residents of the area where the incident occurred, their presence in the vicinity is not surprising. He further asserts about Mohammed, “His mere presence in the alley near his house does not conclusively establish that he was involved in rioting which took place near the main road. There are numerous cases of gang fights, free fights and communal rioting, where many people are just curious bystanders. We call it the ‘curious bystander exception’ to the principles of unlawful assembly.”

Mohammed, who once ran a modest store selling second-hand bags to support his family of five, has been left penniless after his incarceration. His shop is gone, and his livelihood is shattered. Today, he is forced to sell those bags on the pavement outside Jama Masjid – an existence that is not only precarious but also irregular, as he is frequently summoned for court appearances that interrupt any chance of stability.

Inside the prison, he was allegedly also subjected to discrimination and degrading treatment by police authorities solely because he was Muslim. He keeps repeating in a low, broken voice: “Jail bahut buri jagah hai (Jail is a very bad place).”

To survive and continue fighting his legal battle, Mohammed has been forced to take on loans amounting to several lakhs of rupees – a crushing burden that only grows heavier by the day. With no steady income, no end to his legal ordeal in sight, and a family still depending on him, he sees no hope.

After reviewing police reports, filing multiple RTI applications, speaking with investigating officers, defence lawyers and AI experts, and analysing court documents related to cases involving more than 50 accused individuals, The Wire found at least one case in which several accused were “identified” using facial recognition technology – sometimes based solely on side or even rear profiles captured in video footage. Despite the absence of any public witnesses confirming the presence of these accused at the crime scene, the police allegedly proceeded with the arrests.

Also, in response to an RTI filed in 2022, the Delhi Police acknowledged that facial recognition technology was used to investigate “over 750 cases related to the North East Delhi riots” and that the results were presented as evidence against those........

© The Wire