KATHMANDU, APRIL 28: DIG Nawaraj Silwal allegedly falsified the performance appraisal certificates he tendered to the Supreme Court while filing a writ petition seeking appointment as Nepal Police chief, a forensic examination of the documents has found. The allegation, if proved, could land the veteran police officer "at least 10 years" in jail.
The forensic examination report, which was conducted at the behest of the government and is expected to be submitted to the SC, has concluded that Silwal, who was one of three contenders for Nepal Police chief, had "copied and pasted" marks given to incumbent IGP Aryal for one particular year and used it in his own certificate.
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On April 10, the Cabinet had promoted DIG Prakash Aryal to Nepal Police chief on the basis of the recommendation of a high-level committee which found him ahead of the other contenders in terms of performance appraisal.
The committee, which included the attorney general, the secretary at the Prime Minister"s Office, the home secretary, the law secretary and the acting IGP, had found that Aryal earned 154.2 points during his four-year tenure as DIG, while his closest rival DIG Silwal earned 152.4 points. But Silwal had moved the SC claiming that the report was inaccurate. In the document submitted to the apex court, Silwal has two points more than Aryal.
But the forensic examination report on the documents presented in court found that the document presented by Silwal was forged. The test conducted by the Central Police Forensic Science Laboratory found that DIG Silwal had copied the marks given to IGP Aryal from the Nepal Police performance appraisal report of fiscal year 2072-73 BS [2015-16].
The document in question obtained by Republica is found to have used a different font for some of the words . While the original documents are in Utsaha font, the fake document has Kalimati font in Unicode. Forensic examiners have found that the document was altered using Photoshop tools.
According to the report, the forensic test found that the doctored certificate had superimposed some wording lifted from the original certificate of IGP Aryal. The superimposed wording did not tally only in four places. The test also traced some unnecessary signatures, omission of some words and alteration in spacing between the original and fake documents. Similarly, the characters of a few words used in the forged document do not match characters used in the original.
It remains unclear how DIG Silwal obtained the internal appraisal of IGP Aryal. Copies of the document are kept sealed separately at Nepal Police headquarters, the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Public Service Commission in view of its confidential nature. The copy sent to the Public Service Commission has not even been opened yet.
“We are still investigating how the documents got into DIG Silwal"s hands. This act itself is an offense punishable by law,” said a senior police officer who declined to be named, citing the sensitivity of the case.
In addition to the fresh revelation, testimony given by former IGP Upendra Kant Aryal to the government-formed investigation committee is also not helpful for DIG Silwal. In his written testimony, former IGP Aryal stated that IGP Aryal had earned a higher score than DIG Nawaraj Silwal in the three-year performance appraisal.
