Supreme Court admits CBI’s plea on acquittal of Talwar couple

New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Friday admitted an appeal filed by the CBI against the Allahabad high court verdict acquitting Aarushi’s parents — Rajesh and Nupur Talwar — in the murder of their daughter.

A three-judge bench of Justices Ranjan Gogoi, Naveen Sinha, and K.M. Joseph admitted the appeal and sought a reply from the Talwars.

Normally, it takes at least a decade for the apex court to dispose of a criminal appeal. Taking note of this, the bench “expedited the hearing.”   

Fourteen-year-old Aarushi was found dead inside her room in Talwars’ Noida residence with her throat slit in May 2008. The needle of suspicion had initially moved towards 45-year-old Hemraj, who had gone missing, but his body was recovered from the terrace of the house two days later.

As the Uttar Pradesh police drew flak over a shoddy probe into the case which was making national headlines, the then chief minister Mayawati had recommended a probe by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). The case was subsequently handed over to the agency.

A CBI court at Ghaziabad sentenced the Talwars to life imprisonment on November 26, 2013, in connection with the case.

The high court, however, later freed them of the charges on the ground that they could not be held guilty on the basis of the evidence on record. In November 2017, Hemraj’s wife, Banjade, had filed an appeal against the acquittal.

The CBI filed the appeal in March this year. The CBI said that the high court order was wrong on several counts.

“The Talwars are killers, but the high court had set them free,” the CBI said.

It prayed for the quashing of the impugned judgment.  

On February 9, retired special CBI judge Shyam Lal, who convicted the Talwar couple in 2013, also moved the apex court against the high court judgement seeking expunction of certain observations.

He had said that the criticism against him in the Allahabad high court verdict was “disparaging” and “unwarranted”.

The high court verdict had said the trial judge took evidence and circumstances of the case for granted and tried to solve it like a “mathematical puzzle when one solves a given question and then takes something for granted in order to solve that puzzle and question”.

It had also said “the trial judge cannot act like a maths teacher who is solving a mathematical question by analogy after taking certain figure for granted”.