M A I N   N E W S

Arushi’s father only ‘suspect’, claims CBI
* But says can’t nail him for lack of evidence
* Talwars fume
* Moily summons the investigation agency boss
Tribune News Service

New Delhi, December 31
The CBI might have expressed its helplessness in solving the murders of Arushi (14) and her family’s domestic help, Hemraj, in its closure report filed before a Ghaziabad court on December 29, but it appears that her doctor-father, Rajesh Talwar, was the only suspect in its eyes.

The agency has underlined circumstantial evidence and the suspicious behaviour of Rajesh Talwar to buttress its claims while admitting in the same vein that it did not have enough evidence to chargesheet him.

In fact, Rajesh Talwar is the only person named in the column of suspects in its closure report. It has given a clean chit to three local servants, who were all friends of Hemraj, whom it had arrested for their murder. The report said their alibi was strong. Though the CBI had once told a court that one of them, Krishna, had “confessed”.

The nation’s outrage over the country’s premier probe agency’s admission of failure today resulted in Law Minister Veerappa Moily summoning CBI Director AP Singh. Moily defended the agency and said it had done a thorough job but added that they discussed the possibility of a “further progress” in the case. Several other organisations, including National Commission for Women, have also written to the government, calling for further probe.

As these significant bits of the closure report emerged today, Rajesh Talwar and his wife Nupur Talwar reacted with anger and termed the CBI’s claims “absurd and defamatory”. Nupur accused the agency of making pathetic attempts to hide its failure by maligning their names even as they lost their only daughter and did everything in their capacity to cooperate with the probe, including agreeing to undergo polygraph and narco tests.

Their lawyer Rebecca John said the agency could not do anything in the last two-and-a- half years and was resorting to levelling wild and baseless allegations to save its face.

Interestingly, it was the CBI which first gave Talwar a clean chit after it took over the probe from the Noida police, which had arrested Rajesh Talwar, accusing him of killing Aarushi and Hemraj after finding them in a “compromising position” on the night between May 15 and May 16, 2008.

The CBI has apparently now come to believe the UP police theory and said in its report that Talwars tried to influence a doctor who conducted Aarushi’s post-mortem and asked him to skip the virginity test. The evidence was also destroyed and only Talwars were in a position to do so.

One of the many mysteries of this case was that the Aarushi’s purported vaginal swab was found fudged by a forensic lab, denying the agency potentially a key evidence.

The post-mortem was done under the supervision of the Noida police, John said, and Talwars could not have influenced it. She accused the CBI of selectively targeting Talwars.

The report also says that Aarushi was likely to have been killed between midnight and 1 am, as per the post-mortem report, and it was hard to believe that Rajesh Talwar, who was surfing internet till midnight, would not have known what was happening in Aarushi’s room.