Aarushi case not a first: CBI has history of failures

Aarushi’s murder mystery is not the only case where the country’s premier agency, CBI, failed. There are other instances too.

The CBI on November 10, had found no evidence to support the allegations made by Ruchika Girhotra’s family against former Haryana police chief SPS Rathore and filed a closure report in a court here.

The CBI gave a point-by-point rebuttal to all eight charges made by Ruchika’s father SC Girhotra and four allegations made by her brother Ashu who claimed that he was taken home in a semi-nude condition and that false cases were slapped on him about auto-theft at behest of Rathore. As the CBI filed the closure report saying the allegations levelled by the duo against Rathore were unfounded and baseless, the court issued notices to Girhotra and Ashu.

In another case on August 31, the CBI gave clean chit to Sureender Koli’s employer Moninder Singh Pandher in the Nithari killings and had filed closure reports in three of the 19 cases registered in 2006.

The investigation agency stated it did not find any evidence suggesting the children had gone missing from Nithari as the DNAs did not match. Closure reports have been filed in the cases of six-year-old Soni, 13-year-old Sheikh Raza and a third FIR on “miscellaneous children”. Of the 19 cases, CBI filed chargesheets in 16. However, Pandher was spared in many of those too, after the CBI claimed that “he was not present in the house at the time of crime” and the murders were committed solely by his domestic help, Koli.

In another case, the CBI on October this year filed an application before the chief metropolitan court in Delhi seeking closure of the Bofors pay off case against Italian businessman Ottavio Quattrocchi. The CBI filed a withdrawal report under Section 321 of the Criminal Procedure Code. (CrPC).The CBI also informed the court that all efforts to extradite Quattrocchi to face trial in India had failed.

In 1984 anti- Sikh riot case, in April this year, a city court let off senior Congress leader Jagdish Tytler after accepting CBI’s closure report giving clean chit to him. Accepting the CBI’s closure report giving a clean chit to the former Union minister, the court had observed that there was no ground to order further investigation in the case. The CBI had submitted that there was nothing to proceed against 66-year-old Tytler as two witnesses, Jasbir Singh and Surinder Singh, were not reliable and their statements were “false and concocted”.