The Supreme Court Friday asked the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to respond to dentist couple Nupur and Rajesh Talwar’s plea to transfer their trial in their daughter Aarushi’s murder case from Ghaziabad to a Delhi court.
A bench of Justice B.S.Chauhan and Justice Jagdish Singh Khehar issued notice to the CBI after senior counsel Harish Salve told the court that most of the 60 witnesses in the case were residing in Delhi and Rajesh Talwar was facing threat to his life if he attended trial before the special CBI court in Ghaziabad.
Talwar and his wife Nupur have sought the transfer of their trial to the special CBI court in Delhi.
The apex court January 6, 2012, had cleared the decks for the trial of the Talwar couple after it rejected their plea against being named the main accused in the 2008 murder of their 14-year-old daughter in their own flat in Noida.
The Talwars had approached the Supreme Court to overrule the verdict of a lower court that ordered the CBI to make them the main accused in the case.
Aarushi, a Class 8 student of Delhi Public School, was found with her throat slit in her bedroom at her parents’ Noida apartment May 16, 2008.
The family’s domestic help Hemraj, whom police initially thought to be the prime suspect, was also found killed on the apartment’s terrace a day later.
The murders grabbed national headlines and every development was followed keenly – the charges, counter-charges and court drama involving the parents and investigators.
Rajesh Talwar was arrested and kept behind bars for 50 days in connection with the crime but was later let off because of lack of evidence against him. The CBI then arrested Krishna and two other domestic helps in the neighbourhood, Raj Kumar and Vijay Mandal, who too were let out on bail later.
In December 2010, the CBI filed a closure report in the case before the special court in Ghaziabad, but stated that it had circumstantial evidence against the Talwars in Aarushi’s murder.
However, Talwar approached court against the closure, demanding further investigation. The apex court too rejected the closure report, and in a dramatic twist summoned both the parents to face trial, and directed the CBI to prosecute them.
