NEW DELHI
Jigisha Ghosh’s murder investigation led the police to solve journalist Soumya Vishwanathan’s murder mystery. Vishwanathan was murdered on 30 September 2008, while she was returning to her home in Vasant Kunj after completing her shift from her Jhandewalan office.
While she was riding her Zen car, she was spotted by four drunk people. They tried to stop her car, and in doing so, they fired on her with a gun, resulting in her on-the-spot death. From first glance, it looked like an accident, but later, during the investigation, it turned out to be a murder.
Speaking on the court verdict, H.G.S. Dhaliwal, now special commissioner of police and then investigator, said, “We are happy and satisfied that justice has been served after 15 long years. This was a big case for the Delhi Police. There were a lot of challenges in the case. All the accused have been convicted in the 2008 Delhi journalist Soumya Vishwanathan murder case. We are all satisfied. The team has made a lot of efforts in this case.
The case depended on circumstantial evidence, and it is challenging to secure a conviction on the basis of circumstantial evidence in murder cases.
There were a lot of challenges, but finally we prevailed in our duty.”
The police could not find any clue in Vishwanathan’s case for six months, but a breakthrough came while they were investigating the murder of Jigisha Ghosh, an IT professional who went missing on 18 March 2009 and whose body was recovered from the Surajkund area in Faridabad. The police then traced the ATM from which the accused had withdrawn money, and based on CCTV footage of the ATM, they arrested 3 accused, Ravi Kapoor, Amit Shukhla, and Baljeet Malik, in Ghosh’s murder. They later confessed to another murder of journalist Soumya Vishwanathan at Nelson Mandela Marg. The police then recovered a country-made pistol.