“and it is not necessary nowadays, except in a few cases, to allege or prove who is, in law, the owner of the goods or money stolen; indeed in an information, although it is the practice to do so it is not essential to name any person in the information. In a case of stealing golf balls, Hibbert v. McKiernan, Goddard, L.C.J., said: “In the present case any difficulty might have been avoided by describing the balls, or at any rate seven of them, as the property of persons unknown, and at the present day allegations concerning the ownership of stolen property are, except in a few exceptional cases, treated as immaterial”. Obviously what Lord Goddard said depends upon Rule 6 of the Indictment Rules, 1915, which is now our Section 154 (1) of the Criminal Procedure Ordinance, which reads:- “The description of property in a charge shall be in ordinary language and such as to indicate with reasonable clearness the property referred to and if the property is so described it shall not be necessary, except when required for the purpose of describing an offence depending on any special ownership of property or special value of property, to name the person to whom the property belongs or the value of the property.” The 3rd Schedule to the Criminal Procedure Ordinance, however, dealing with forms of indictment for stealing at p. 1012 Vol. II of the Laws of the Federation, shows that the owner is usually named or should be named. The position can be put thus: where the owner of the property is known, it is more satisfactory if he be so named in the information; if the owner is not known, the charge should be laid as the property of persons unknown.”
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