With the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) casting strong aspersions on the role of Aarushi Talwar’s father in her murder, the parents Saturday again lashed out at the agency for making “wild” allegations without a shred of evidence.
Fourteen-year-old Aarushi was found murdered under mysterious circumstances in her parents’ Jalvayu Vihar apartment in Noida, Delhi’s suburban town in Uttar Pradesh, May 16, 2008. The family’s domestic help, Hemraj, was also found killed on the flat’s terrace a day later.
The CBI Wednesday moved a Ghaziabad court seeking its permission to close the Aarushi Talwar murder as an unsolved case on grounds of lack of conclusive evidence. In its closure report, the agency has named the girl’s dentist father Rajesh Talwar as the lone suspect in the case.
The closure report, a copy of which is with IANS, said the murder scene had been heavily dressed up, which could only have been done by her parents.
It further stated that a bottle of Scotch whisky was found on the dining table. But according to the probe agency, any intruder would not have had sufficient time to consume liquor on the night of murder May 16, 2008.
But the parents say they are being maligned.
These allegations are so wild, so speculative, and so imaginative that means there are people in the CBI who are absolutely unscientific. I mean they don’t even think like intelligent police officers. This is the state of the CBI? Aarushi’s mother Nupur Talwar told a news channel.
Reacting to media reports that Rajesh Talwar was the only suspect in the double murder case, she added: If they had chargesheeted, I would have defended myself in the trial. But this is something they have purposely left hanging to us for the rest of our lives. You close the case, yet you are left with suspicions on you the rest of your life.”
Nupur Talwar said both she and her husband were devastated by CBI’s allegations, having to relive the days of 2008 repeatedly.
“Today, Rajesh is not able to sit here and talk to you, because he is completely broken and shattered,” he said.
Lawyers representing Aarushi’s parents are now waiting for Monday, when they expect the special court in Ghaziabad to take up the closure report. The parents are already planning to file a protest petition to fight the CBI’s appeal to the court to close the case.
“Unless we see the complete closure report, it would be very premature to comment on any aspect of the case. If there are allegations against the Talwar couple, we will look into it. We will take up each and every aspect of the report point by point,” counsel Rebecca John told IANS.
She accused the CBI of “playing a game”.
“There is absolutely no evidence against Dr. Talwar, which makes the CBI’s allegations full of ambiguity,” she added.
The closure report also notes that during a lie detector test at the Forensic Sciences Laboratory in Gandhinagar, Rajesh and Nupur Talwar had said that they used to lock Aarushi’s bedroom at night.
The door to Aarushi’s bedroom had a lock which could be opened from inside without a key, but once it was shut, it could not be opened from outside without a key.
According to them, they found the door to Aarushi’s bedroom unlocked and slightly ajar on the morning of May 16, 2008. But they could not explain whether they had locked her bedroom on the night of May 15, and why the keys were not traceable the next morning after the girl’s murder was discovered.
According to the CBI, Aarushi’s room could either be opened by the girl from inside or her parents from outside by using the keys.
The findings of the investigation team reveal a number of circumstances that indicate the involvement of the parents in the crime and the cover-up, the agency’s closure report says.
However, there were a number of critical and serious gaps in the circumstances which made it difficult to string together the sequence of events and the motive behind the gruesome murder, the report said.
The probe team was handicapped by the inability of the local police to examine the scene of crime properly and collect all possible evidences, it said.
In 2008, Rajesh Talwar was arrested and kept behind bars for 50 days in connection with the killings, but was later let off because of lack of evidence. The CBI later arrested his medical assistant Krishna and two other domestic helps in the neighbourhood, Raj Kumar and Vijay Mandal.
The lawyer for the three employees Naresh Yadav said that if CBI had apprehension that the crime scene had been violated, then it should have registered a complaint.
“They (CBI) should have registered a case against the parents or the Noida police or the investigators if they found examples of tampering of evidence,” he said.