Rajesh and Nupur Talwar have been wrongly cleared of charges, CBI said in Supreme Court (File)
Highlights
- Nupur and Rajesh Talwar were released from jail in October last year
- Allahabad High Court had cancelled life sentence given by a lower court
- Aarushi Talwar was found with her throat slit in her bedroom in May 2008
Rajesh and Nupur Talwar have been wrongly cleared of charges of murdering their teen daughter Aarushi and domestic help, the Central Bureau of Investigation, has told the Supreme Court. In its appeal, the Central Bureau of Investigation, or CBI said that the court's clean chit to the Talwars were guilty was wrong on "many counts".
The dentist couple had walked out of Ghaziabad's Dasna prison last October after the Allahabad High Court cancelled the life sentence handed out to them by a lower court in 2013.
The Talwars' daughter Aarushi was found with her throat slit in her bedroom just days short of her 14th birthday in 2008. The family's domestic help Hemraj was suspected until his body was discovered the next day on the rooftop of the building where the family lived in Noida near Delhi.
Both parents of Arushi had denied the murder charges
It wasn't clear for a long time if the CBI would appeal against the high court verdict. For one, many officers including AP Singh, who headed the CBI for a key part of the investigation, had conceded there were "loopholes" in the agency's case.
The high court, which had ordered release of Rajesh and Nupur Talwar, had pointed to some of them and made scathing observations about the trial court judge Shyam Lal for, "like a film director", "try to thrust coherence amongst facts inalienably scattered here and there".
Last month, Judge Shyam Lal, now retired, had filed a petition in the Supreme Court to ask that the "unwarranted" personal comments made by the high court should be expunged from the verdict.
But it was Hemraj's wife Khumkala Banjade who was the first to challenge the acquittal.
Ms Banjade, who had petitioned the Supreme Court in December last year, said the High Court had accepted that her husband was killed and the investigating agency or CBI cannot abandon its responsibility to uncover the murder.
"We've come to the Supreme Court for justice... the high court freed them (Talwars), they are killers... they should be punished," she had then said.
Hemraj's wife was the first to challenge the acquittal
Aarushi and Hemraj's murder does remain India's most sensational whodunit.
The court that convicted the couple accepted circumstantial evidence offered by the CBI. Investigators said the double murder was an inside job because the apartment had not been broken into and the "last seen" principle indicts the Talwars because the victims were in their presence before they were killed.
The police had alleged that the Talwars were furious after finding their daughter in a compromising position with Hemraj, but offered no evidence to substantiate this premise.
Both parents had denied the murder and insisted they were victims of botched investigations and unfair media coverage, damaging their defence.