The revelation came from senior Delhi Police counsel Mukta Gupta, who blamed the gruff nature of the Crime Branch officers to their professional hazard of having to largely deal with “gangsters and kidnappers”.

Joint Commissioner of Police (Northern Range) Karnal Singh was in court on Wednesday when Gupta made the comments.

Chief Justice A P Shah, however, ruled that the Crime Branch should be asked to investigate allegations of child-trafficking and exploitation of 35 girls and four boys. The youths, most of them minors, were rescued from various placement agencies on January 13 by teams from the Delhi Commission for Women (DCW) and an NGO.

In an attempt to dissuade the court from ordering the investigations to be given to the Crime Branch, Gupta said, “Crime Branch officers are hardliners. (They) get to deal with only gangsters and kidnappers (and) may not be the right department to handle this sensitive investigation, which has to deal with women’s issues.”

What also comes as a handicap, the counsel argued, is there are “very little or almost no women police officers in Crime Branch to interact with the rescued girls in a friendly manner”. But the court ordered, “The JCP (Crime Branch) will draw women officers from the Crime against Women Cell.”

The court insisted on a Crime Branch probe after it found, during hearing, that the girls had accused their placement agents of various criminal offences like “forced labour, illegal confinement and beating” to a two-member team of advocate Sunita Tiwari and DCW representative Reny Jacob on January 24. But the same girls opted to remain quiet merely three days later when they were brought by the police to record their sworn statements before four different magistrate courts.

“It is strange that these girls had nothing to say before the magistrates, when they had opened up in front of the team of experts,” the Bench observed. “Their (stands) are diametrically opposite in both instances… have they been tutored by police officers?”

The Bench also criticised the “mechanical” way in which the magistrates had recorded their statements without lending a thought to why the girls had changed their version so abruptly. “Either the police or the court has not applied their minds to the plight of these girls,” it said.