Court reprimands Bureau for lack of manpower.
By Tathagata Mitra
BANGALORE: Thirteen months after Jiah Khan found hanging from the ceiling in her apartment, the Bombay High Court has ordered the case be handed over to the CBI.
A division bench of Justice V M Kanade and Justice P D Kode ordered a Special Investigation Team (SIT) to hand over the matter to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). This was in accordance with a plea filed by Jiah’s mother Rabbiya Khan last October seeking a probe by the central agency.
“The case is handed over to CBI for further investigations and to assess whether Jiah Khan committed suicide or was murdered,” the division bench said, according to IANS. They added that they were not expressing any opinion on the merits of the probe done by the Mumbai police.
Jiah Khan’s mother Rabbiya who was never convinced that her daughter’s death to be a suicide, had recently asked the British police to look into the matter. She had even written to Foreign Secretary William Hague, asking him to ensure that justice is done to her daughter, according to a Daily Telegraph report.
The court also instructed the Maharashtra government and police to fully support the CBI in investigating the case. The judges also said that there was variance found between the forensic opinions of the police and the one obtained privately with the help of a specialist by Rabbiya. The judges agreed that there was “lacuna” in the probe.
The 25-year-old Jiah Khan was found hanging from her Juhu apartment on June 3, 2013. Following her death her boyfriend Sooraj Pancholi, son of actor Aditya Pancholi, and a rising star himself, was arrested for suspicion of abetment to suicide. The reason for Pancholi’s arrest was a letter found in the Juhu apartment. In it Jiah admitted to suffering from months of physical and mental abuse, and even rape by the hands of an unnamed person. She even admitted to having an abortion weeks before her suicide and blames the same unknown person for her taking this step.
Rabbiya Khan mentioned in her petition of the several circumstances which were an indication that Jiah might have been killed rather than having killed herself, and how police had allegedly discarded the opinion of a private forensic expert she had given them.
The seating judges also took it up with the CBI on its reluctance to take up the case due to lack in manpower. “It is not expected of CBI to come out with such an excuse – that they do not have enough officers to conduct a probe. In a country of one billion people, an agency like CBI should not take such a stance otherwise, where will the citizens go to seek justice,” Justice Kanade noted.
As Jiah was a British-American citizen, two officers of the US Consulate remained present throughout the hearing.
Jiah was survived by her mother and two sisters.