The acquittal of Dr Rajesh and Nupur Talwar of the charge of killing their own daughter Aarushi and servant Hemraj by the Allahabad High Court has brought into sharp focus the credibility and behaviour of the UP police that botched up initial investigations and went on to help the CBI go completely astray in the final investigations.
Within 48 hours of the murders on 16 May 2008, IG Gurdarshan Singh declared at the press conference that the prime suspect was Dr Rajesh Talwar and even attributed an honour killing angle to the double murders, without having an iota of evidence to back his theory.
Even though the post mortem did not point to any sexual assault on Aarushi, he claimed that the father had found his daughter and servant in a “compromising position”.
Aarushi Talwar, 14, was found murdered in her room in Noida and the missing servant Hemraj, 45, was initially suspected to be the killer. However, a day later the body of Hemraj was found on the terrace of the flat in which the Talwar family lived.
Talking to this correspondent a day after the acquittal by the Allahabad High Court, a former CBI officer, who was one of the members of the investigating team, said, “When the case came to us, it was a blind murder. The UP police had ignored the bloodstains on the staircase, the fingerprints and footprints were not taken and the crime scene was trampled over by neighbours, visitors, media persons and policemen. The dog squad was not called in—in short, the police did not carry out any investigations and merrily arrived at a conclusion that earned them headlines.”
The court finally gave the couple the benefit of the doubt and quashed their life sentence, ending their nine-year ordeal.
The judges observed that the circumstantial evidences against the Talwars were inadequate and the CBI had failed to fill in the gaps in the evidences. Nupur and Rajesh Talwar have been serving their sentence in Dasna jail in Ghaziabad since November 2013.
The Allahabad High Court was apparently not satisfied with the CBI contention which was not supported by adequate circumstantial evidence and believed that the couple should be given the benefit of the doubt.
Meer Tanvir Ahmad , the counsel for the Talwars, said that the court pointed out that there was a “strong alternative theory” in the case—the one about some outsiders being present in the flat when the murders took place. This was the theory propounded by the first CBI team that carried out investigations and was also supported by the narco test on Krishna , one of the servants. Ahmad said that the court turned down the CBI theory of the second team that there was no third person in the house when the murders took place.