Even as the Supreme Court awaits a forensic analysis of the audio tapes purported to implicate Manipur Chief Minister N. Biren Singh for his alleged role in the State’s ethnic conflict by a government laboratory, an analysis conducted by Truth Labs Forensic Services, a private non-profit, has said that comparisons with samples of Mr. Singh’s public speeches showed that there was a 93% probability that the voice in the leaked tapes was that of the Manipur Chief Minister.
The forensic report of Truth Labs said in its final opinion that auditory, spectrographic statistical, and likelihood analysis showed that the “voice of the speaker in both questioned and standard recordings was identified to be one and the same with high probability”.
The report said that repeated critical listening had “indicated the similarity of voices”, adding that “intonation patterns of about 20 commonly uttered words found in the samples were found to be similar, and that the vowel distribution pattern analysed for commonly uttered words and other words “were found to be similar with high probability”.
Under the acoustic analysis of the audio, the laboratory said, “No abrupt changes in the background noise, context, tone consistency of speech fluency, loudness, could be detected.” It also noted in the audio authentication section that “no abrupt changes were found in the time-domain waveform and spectrogram of the audio signals in the recordings”.
A Manipur government source told The Hindu that there is “no need to comment” on these findings “as it has nothing to do with CM N. Biren Singh”. Ever since the tapes were leaked, the Manipur government has maintained that it is “doctored” and is being investigated by the State police.
The report noted that the original audio tapes, purported to be that of Mr. Singh speaking in the Meitei language, was submitted as an audio-video recording file, “created using a preexisting audio recording in order to add English subtitles”. This audio-video file was created on August 14, 2024, with a video-editing tool “possibly used for adding English transcription and saved as audio-video file”. It was modified once on the same date within minutes, the report said.
The forensic analysis was commissioned by the Kuki Organisation for Human Rights Trust (KOHRT) through its lawyer Prashant Bhushan in November 2024. The KOHRT has moved the Supreme Court seeking a thorough probe into the alleged role of Mr. Singh in the violence, based on the leaked audio tapes that were released on social media in mid-2024.
The Truth Labs analysis was concluded on January 18 and a copy of the report has been submitted by the petitioners to the Supreme Court along with a supplementary affidavit. In the supplementary affidavit filed along with the Truth Labs report, the petitioner said, “In such circumstances there is a clear and strong prima facie evidence showing involvement of highest functionary i.e. Chief Minister of Manipur in the ongoing ethnic violence.”
Soon after the recordings became public, Kuki-Zo civil society organisations and MLAs had said it proved the Chief Minister’s involvement “without an iota of doubt”. The Kuki Students’ Organisation had said at the time that the recordings revealed that Mr. Singh was “boasting in a closed-door meeting with his cliques that he initiated the war against the Kuki-Zo people to save Meitei civilisation”.
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.
