The Supreme Court on Monday, February 3, sought a forensic report from the Central Forensic Science Laboratory (CFSL) in a sealed cover regarding the authenticity of leaked audio recordings, allegedly implicating Manipur Chief Minister N Biren Singh in the state’s ongoing ethnic conflict. The Supreme Court bench comprising Chief Justice of India (CJI) Sanjiv Khanna and Justice Sanjay Kumar directed Solicitor General Tushar Mehta to submit the CFSL report by March 24.
“It is pointed out that the audio clips have been sent for examination by the CFSL. The report shall be produced in a sealed cover before the court on the next date of hearing,” the court said.
Meanwhile, a separate analysis by Truth Labs Forensic Services, a private non-profit, found a 93% probability that the voice in the leaked tapes matched Biren Singh’s. The report concluded that auditory, spectrographic, and statistical analyses confirmed a high probability that the voice samples belonged to the same speaker. Truth Labs, set up in 2007, is India’s first independent forensic laboratory and has worked with various courts, investigative agencies, and government bodies.
In the leaked tapes, Biren Singh is allegedly heard instructing that Meitei groups be allowed to seize state-owned weapons and assuring that he would prevent their arrest. The recordings, first released on 7 and 20 August 2024, were analyzed by Truth Labs using audio samples from Biren’s public speeches and interviews.
Advocate Prashant Bhushan, representing the petitioner ‘The Kuki Organisation for Human Rights Trust (KOHUR)’, submitted the Truth Labs report to the Supreme Court, which concluded that there was a 93% match between the voice samples and that of CM Singh.
He argued that it provided “clear and strong prima facie evidence” of Biren Singh’s involvement in the ethnic violence. The petitioner has called for an investigation monitored by a Special Investigation Team (SIT).
The Manipur government has dismissed the recordings as “doctored” stating that the police were conducting an investigation. In an official release in August last year, the government said, “this doctored audio is a malicious attempt by certain sections to incite communal violence or to derail the peace process that has been initiated at multiple levels.”
The forensic report noted that the audio evidence was received on two pen drives. Truth Labs conducted the analysis using samples from a press conference and an interview featuring Biren Singh, both sourced from YouTube, alongside standard audio-video files marked with serial numbers S1 to S6.
“It has been found that the probability of the male speakers in the ‘Q/M (audio files)’ and ‘S/M (audio-video files)’ being the same person is 93%,” the report stated. Samples Q1 to Q4 were provided on one pen drive, with Q1 identified as the original audio and the others as excerpts from the main file.
“The intonation patterns of around 20 commonly uttered words found in the samples were similar,” it added, noting that “vowel distribution patterns” analyzed for these and other words by the speakers in both sets of recordings “were found to be similar with high probability.”
The audio recordings were first released in parts on August 7, 2024, and another segment released on August 20.
Soon after the recordings became public, Kuki-Zo civil society organisations and MLAs stated that it proved the Chief Minister’s involvement “without an iota of doubt.” The Kuki Students’ Organisation had claimed at the time that the recordings revealed that Singh was “boasting in a closed-door meeting with his cliques that he initiated the war against the Kuki-Zo people to save Meitei civilization.”
Manipur has been on the boil due to widespread violence between the Meitei and Kuki communities since May 3, 2023, resulting in at least 200 deaths, hundreds of injuries, and the displacement of thousands.
Truth Labs was set up as an independent forensic sciences laboratory in Hyderabad in 2007 by a group of retired Directors of Central and State Forensic Science Laboratories and is relied upon by the Supreme Court, at least six High Courts, trial courts, police, the Central Bureau of Investigation, the National Investigation Agency, Central Reserved Police Force, and around 200 Central and State government Ministries, departments, and PSUs, among other authorities, according to its website.