Tag Archive for 'Aarushi Talwar'

A case of curious contradictions

Published on February 20, 2011 in Crime. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

On Aarushi Talwar, two columns in the Hindustan Times. Shohoni Ghosh says with the number of contradictions that have now emerged, it is time to ask new questions.

On February 9, magistrate Preeti Singh of the Ghaziabad court charged Aarushi Talwar’s parents with murder and the destruction of evidence on the basis of the closure report of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). The CBI could not gather enough evidence to chargesheet the Talwars but it left behind a trail of damaging insinuations that the media replayed without hesitation or conscience. Neither the closure report nor the magistrate’s orders were questioned for their glaring contradictions.  

No one was at the scene of crime but everyone seems to know what happened. A deranged vigilante murderously assaults Rajesh Talwar as bloggers across the country applaud him. Even the closure report’s graphic reconstruction of events relies on a textual analysis of photographs. On January 13, writer-socialite Shobhaa De tweets: “Is it true Nupur is not Aaroshi’s (sic) biological mother? Will the CBI confirm? If Nupur isn’t her real mom, then who is?” Displaying a shockingly regressive view of parenting, De adds a spin to proliferating rumours. The element of reasonable doubt goes missing. more

Namita Bhandare asks why we remain obsessed with the murder two years ago of this 14-year-old girl.

I  am mystified by our ongoing fascination with the murder two years ago of 14-year-old Aarushi Talwar. Part of our morbid interest, I am guessing, stems from the mysteriousness of this double murder. Despite three investigations — though let’s not accuse the Noida police of anything close to an ‘investigation’ — two from seperate CBI teams, we are no closer to the truth about what happened on the night of May 15, 2008, when the ninth grade teenager was killed at home.  

First we are told that the servant, Hemraj Banjade, did it. A day later when the body of the unfortunate Banjade was discovered, Noida police say it was the father, Rajesh Talwar, who had done it. Motives keep changing, from incest to wife-swapping and honour killing to ‘characterless’ behaviour. The father is arrested, the father is released. The case is transferred to the CBI, then a second team takes over. The murder weapon keeps changing: it’s a khukri, no it’s a surgical instrument or perhaps it’s a golf club. Every norm of decency is set aside as Aarushi’s postmortem vaginal examination becomes the subject of speculation.

If this is trial by insinuation, then our investigating agencies have succeeded. more

Aarushi murder investigation: A very curious case of selective interpretation

Published on February 13, 2011 in Crime, India and Media. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Manoj Mitta in The Times of India:

May 16, 2008 | When her blood-stained body was lying before him for his postmortem investigation, the only unusual detail Sunil Dohre recorded about Aarushi’s vagina was that there was a “whitish discharge.” As for the column related to the external examination of her genitals, the Uttar Pradesh government doctor simply wrote “NAD”, which is an abbreviation for “nothing abnormal detected.” Again, after an internal examination of Aarushi’s genitals, all he wrote while performing his statutory duty was NAD.

July 18, 2008 | In his statement to the first CBI team headed by Arun Kumar, Dohre disclosed that Aarushi’s uncle Dinesh Talwar had asked him during the postmortem if there was any sign of rape. Dohre added that he had told the uncle that nothing could be said about that possibility till the two slides of vaginal swab he had taken were pathologically tested. He reiterated that the only feature that stood out at the time of the postmortem was the whitish discharge in her vagina.

September 30, 2009 | Within 20 days of taking over the case, the second CBI team headed by Nilabh Kishore took another statement from Dohre. He now recalled a bunch of new details about Aarushi’s private parts and revived, in effect, the so-called honour killing theory first propounded by the Uttar Pradesh police when they arrested her father Rajesh Talwar a week after her murder. Sixteen months after recording NAD in his postmortem report, Dohre said for the first time (a) that Aarushi’s hymen was ruptured and it had an old tear, (b) that her vaginal orifice was “unduly large” and the mouth of her cervix was visible and (c) that her private parts appeared to have been cleaned after her death because the whitish discharge was confined to the vagina when it should have spread to the “entire area.” More:

Aarushi Talwar: a nightmare with no end

Published on February 9, 2011 in Crime. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Nupur and Rajesh Talwar at the Ghaziabad court

On Headlines Today, Harinder Baweja speaks to an emotional Rajesh and Nupur Talwar a few hours after a special CBI court added a new twist to the Aarushi Talwar murder case by naming the teenager’s parents as accused. “I did everything they asked me to,” says a sobbing Rajesh Talwar. “We are parents who have lost our precious child. Why are they doing this to us?”

See that interview here.

The Talwars who were opposing the CBI’s closure report and seeking fresh investigation into the case will now appear as accused. The special court will remand the case to a sessions court for framing of charges and the subsequent trials of the Talwars in the two-year-old murder case.

The 13-year-old Aarushi Talwar was found dead with her throat slit in the bedroom of her Noida flat on May 16, 2008. After first declaring that the prime suspect in the murder was the family’s servant, Hemraj, Uttar Pradesh police quickly retracted when the body of Hemraj was found a day later, upstairs in the terrace of the same building. Probing an honour killing angle, Rajesh Talwar was arrested for the two murders. Lie detector and narco tests conducted on both parents have proved to be inconclusive and on December 29, 2010, the CBI filed a closure report in the twin murders, clearing the servants but pointing a finger of suspicion at the parents.

To make matters worse, on January 25, Rajesh Talwar was attacked by a deranged man with a cleaver in the Ghaziabad court premises.

With every new twist to the plot, justice for Aarushi seems to be getting more and more remote.

More details on this case here.

And read the CBI’s closure report here.

Timeline:

  • May 16, 2008: Aarushi Talwar found murdered in her bedroom. Domestic help Hemraj, who was missing, suspected as the killer.
  • May 17: Hemraj’s body found on the terrace of Talwars’ residential building.
  • May 18: Police suspect “insider job” as the murders were done “with surgical precision”.
  • May 19: Talwar’s former domestic help Vishnu Sharma named suspect.
  • May 21: Delhi Police joins murder probe.
  • May 22: Family comes under suspicion, as police probe honour killing angle. The police quiz Aarushi’s close friend.
  • May 23: Aarushi’s father Rajesh Talwar arrested as a key accused.
  • June 1: CBI takes over the probe in the case.
  • June 13: Talwar’s domestic help Krishna arrested by CBI.
  • June 20: Lie detection test of Rajesh Talwar conducted at Central Forensic Science Laboratory, Delhi.
  • June 25: Second lie detection test conducted on Nupur Talwar. Her first lie detection test was found inconclusive.
  • June 26: CBI declares it a “blind case”. Rajesh Talwar denied bail by a special Ghaziabad magistrate.
  • July 3: Supreme Court rejects a PIL challenging the administration of narco-analysis test on the accused in the case.
  • July 12: Rajesh Talwar freed on bail from Ghaziabad jail.
  • January 5, 2010: CBI moves court to conduct narco test on Talwar couple.
  • December 29: CBI submits closure report. Gives clean chit to servants, but points fingers at parents.
  • January 25, 2011: Utsav Sharma, the alleged attacker of Ruchika Girhotra molester — former Haryana DGP S.P.S. Rathore — attacks Rajesh Talwar with a cleaver on Ghaziabad court premises.
  • February 9: Court takes cognisance of CBI report and asks it to continue with prosecution charging Aarushi’s parents with murder and destruction of evidence.

Previously on AW:

Worse than a daughter’s death

The murder tearing Indian society apart

A new day, a new theory

Worse than a daughter’s death

Published on January 28, 2011 in Crime. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , .

A year ago while researching his book India: A Portrait, Patrick French had spent time with Rajesh and Nupur Talwar trying to reconstruct the events of the night their daughter, Aarushi was murdered. An excerpt from the book in Open magazine.

For more than two years, the Aarushi Talwar case has rarely been out of the news. On 25 January, while petitioning a court in Ghaziabad against the way the CBI was handling the investigation into the murder of his daughter, Dr Rajesh Talwar was attacked by a man with a cleaver. He received serious injuries to his face, cutting a facial artery and nerve. While shielding himself, he also received deep wounds to his hands. The attacker – who has been widely hailed on the Internet as a hero – said he had targeted Dr Talwar ‘for becoming popular, for being featured in the media.’

Given all the things that have been said about the case on television and in the press – with some reports based on completely inaccurate information – it was not surprising that a deranged vigilante should choose to attack Rajesh Talwar. As the Talwars’ lawyer, Rebecca John, told me: ‘I have held the media responsible for creating this atmosphere around the case, and I have appealed for calmer days. Like you, I am involved in this case because I genuinely believe that a grave injustice has been done.’ Dr Talwar has told me in the past that the harassment he was receiving from the media and the CBI was so intense that he did not see how he could carry on. The only thing that kept him going, day by day, was his work as a dental surgeon. Now, his hands are so badly damaged that he may never be able to work again. more

Aarushi murder: 10 questions (plus one)

Published on May 29, 2008 in Crime. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Posted by Namita Bhandare:

Ten Questions to the Noida Police. Does anyone have any answers?

1. Does an email exchange between a father and his daughter mean that there was no communication between them, or that they had a friendly chatty style?

2. Was Aarushi involved with Hemraj or was she involved with a teenage student of her school (with whom she exchanged 600-odd emails over the past six weeks)?

3. Did Rajesh Talwar allegedly kill his daughter because he was having an affair or because she was?

4. If Rajesh Talwar was upset about his daughter’s alleged closeness to the family servant, why didn’t he just sack him?

5. If the murder was premediated, ie because Dr Talwar was upset (according to the police chargesheet) why didn’t he as a doctor plan a more sophisticated crime using, perhaps poison that might have been less easy to detect?

6. Does the police actually believe that after killing Hemraj and his own daughter, Dr Rajesh Talwar returned to his bedroom and went off to sleep until 6 am?

7. How much is the SSP’s office at Noida worth in terms of ‘hafta’? How much does it contribute to the Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati?

8. How much pressure was the Noida police under after Mayawati ordered them to solve the crime within three days?

9. Is the name of the victim Aarushi or Shruti?

10. How difficult is it to discover a dead body at the scene of a high profile crime?

And, one question to Indianews (which showed an MMS that it said showed Aarushi. They were lying). 

1. How do you sleep at night assholes?

Aarushi Talwar: a media circus that says something about us

Published on May 28, 2008 in Society. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Posted by Namita Bhandare: My new column in Mint looks at the double murder of 14-year-old Aarushi Talwar and her family servant, Hemant — and the ensuing media circus with a gullible and desperate press clutching at the angles fed to it by an incompetent police force

Because I was out of town with no television access, I missed the first few days of the Aarushi Talwar murder story where a 14-year-old and the domestic help of the house were found murdered in Noida. Yet, even though I came in late, it was obvious to everyone that the story had more holes in it than a tennis net.

Despite the missing links and the questions that seemed to have no answers, it was clear that this story was a best-seller in terms of reader and viewer interest. It had all the ingredients: a shockingly violent crime; a double murder; a bright schoolgirl who had everything to live for, and middle-class, educated parents who seemed as bewildered as we did in trying to understand the motive.

And sell it did. For the next few days, TV channels and newspapers simply couldn’t give us enough of the Aarushi story. Was it a sex crime? Apparently not, said the police; there was no sign of an assault. Was it a love crime? There was some prurient speculation as police released details of calls made some 600 times to a single number in the past six weeks. Was it honour killing? We struggled with the various labels as we tried to sort out the pieces of the puzzle, grabbing the various angles thrown to us by the police.

more

Previously on AW:

Aarushi case: How not to investigate a murder

Published on May 23, 2008 in Crime. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Shoddy police investigation culminating in the arrest of Dr Rajesh Talwar, the father 14-year-old Aarushi Talwar, run like a leitmotif in the aftermath of the gruesome crime. Vandana K. Mittal raises some questions in Merinews.

THE GRUESOME murder of a Noida school girl, Arushi, on Friday (May 16) has not only rattled the residents of the national capital and the surrounding areas, but also angered them at the way the police has gone about investigating this case of brutality towards an innocent girl.

As the news has flashed across the TV screens and has been reported in other media, the entire nation has gaped in utter disbelief at the shoddy and amateur manner in which the case has been handled. Each passing day has brought forth further news of the cavalier manner in which the local cops have gone about their work.

Even in the best of circumstances our police force is not known for scintillating detective work but with this case of Arushi’s murder they have set new lows. What they have missed is not the fine evidence that needs specialised equipment to detect. They have missed a whole dead body lying at the site of the crime!

For the latest news update on the murder from PTI click here.