Indrani Mukerjea is presented in the Mumbai court a week after being arrested for the 2012 murder of her daughter Sheena Bora.
A week after she was arrested for murdering her daughter, Indrani Mukerjea was brought to a Mumbai court today, where she appeared stoic as her lawyers argued that she is being denied basic rights, including unsupervised consultations with them. Ms Mukerjea's surviving daughter, Vidhie, still in her teens, broke down in the court-room. Ms Mukerjea, accused of strangling her older daughter Sheena Bora in 2012, now also faces police charges of attempts to murder her son, Mekhail Bora.
The police says that Ms Mukerjea, a former media executive, has admitted during several lengthy interrogation sessions that she "hated" Ms Bora, who, during her 24 years alive, was presented publicly as her mother's younger sister. Mekhail and she were raised in Guwahati by their maternal grandparents. During this time, Ms Mukerjea married Sanjeev Khanna, a Kolkata businessman with whom she shares a daughter named Vidhie. Then, in 2002, Ms Mukerjea met and married Peter Mukerjea, then CEO of Star Television in India.
Mr Khanna is, along with Ms Mukerjea's driver, an accused in the case. The police says that he has confessed to his complicity, revealing that Ms Mukerjee persuaded him that the Bora siblings were planning to have Vidhie killed. Mekhail Bora, with whom Ms Mukerjea was confronted over the weekend, was to be eliminated by a Mumbai hitman, the police says. On the day that Ms Bora was killed, Mekhail, who had been summoned to Mumbai allegedly to meet with his sister, had been drugged, he has told the police, claiming that he managed to escape from the hotel where he was staying with Mr Khanna.
When Ms Bora, then identified as her sister, disappeared without warning, Ms Mukerjea said she had relocated to Los Angeles. In case Mekhail tried to prove that wrong, she allegedly sought a psychiatrist's assistance in having him declared mentally unstable. When he persisted in demanding information about his older sister, Ms Mukerjee threatened to cut off the monthly stipend that supported him and her parents, he has told the police. Ms Mukerjea has said that her son tried to extort money from her.
She has also reportedly told the police that she was in a financial conflict with Ms Bora, leading the police to treat that as the likely motive of the murder. Earlier, the investigation had focused on Ms Mukerjea's extreme disapproval of Ms Bora's romance with step-brother Rahul Mukerjea, who is Peter Mukerjea's son from a previous marriage.