Four years ago, when Rajesh and Nupur Talwar were sentenced to life imprisonment by a special CBI court for the murder of their teenaged daughter Aarushi and domestic help Hemraj in May 2008, the country was divided into those who believed they were innocent and those who didn’t. In between the clean divide, as the Allahabad High Court cites in its meticulous 273-page judgment Thursday, was a story of “subjective findings”, “falsification” and “deliberate concealment”.
In the judgement, where Justices BK Narayana and AK Mishra acquitted Rajesh and Nupur Talwar, they claimed that the trial judge “like a film director, the judge has tried to thrust coherence amongst facts, inalienably scattered here and there, but not giving any coherence as to what in fact happened.”
Here are just some of the instances where the Allahabad High Court dismissed the validity of the CBI trial.
The question of compromising position
According to the CBI, Rajesh Talwar found his daughter and Hemraj in a compromising postion, The CBI had said that the motive behind the double murder was “grave and sudden provocation” after Rajesh Talwar found his daughter and Hemraj in a “compromising position”, but according to the High court the postmortem report indicated that there was not eve “faint indication” that she was subjected to any kind of sexual assault.
No forced entry
According to the CBI, four people were in house, two died. Therefore the onus was on Talwars to prove that who else could have killed Aarushi and Hemraj. But it was pointed out at the High Court that there was a friendly entry. Hemraj allowed his friends Krishna, Rajkumar and Vijay Mondol to enter via his room. From Hemraj’s room they accessed Aarushi’s room.
Planted witness
According to the High Court, one of the witnesses, Noida administration official Sanjay Chauhan, who claimed that he was one of the first to reach the crime scene in the morning when he saw blood stains on the terrace, was a planted witness.
The court said CBI had brought him only to contradict the Talwars on hearsay evidence.
Tutoring the maid
According to the High court, though Bharti Mandal, the domestic help of the Talwars, was tutored, CBI couldn’t bring out that when she reached the flat next morning, the outermost iron grill door was latched/locked from inside. According to this Economic Times report, it led the court to question the probe team’s next premise — that Aarushi and Hemraj were assaulted by the Talwars in her bedroom after which they dragged the body of Hemraj to the terrace after wrapping it in a bedsheet.
“While examining the theory of alternative hypothesis of the double murder covenanted in the prosecution case itself, we have already held that there is sufficient evidence on record suggesting entry of outsiders into the flat… Moreover, during the course of investigation the CBI had arrested and interrogated Krishna Thadarai, Rajkumar and Vijay Mandal who had remained suspects of the double murder for a considerably long time during the investigation,” said the judgment.
