New Delhi:
The responsibility of the investigation into the Kolkata doctor’s rape-murder case, has been handed over to two of the CBI’s top women officers, who have handled a few such notorious cases earlier, with considerable success. The overall charge belongs Sampat Meena, a 1994 batch IPS officer from Jharkhand, who handled the Hathras rape-murder case and the Unnao rape case. With her is officer Seema Pahuja, who was also part of the Hathras investigation team.
Ms Meena, an Additional Director, is now in charge of a team of 25 officers, and will work in a supervisory capacity. The ground level investigation will be carried out by Ms Pahuja, an Additional Superintendent of Police, has received the Gold Medal twice for excellent investigation between 2007 and 2018. The officer, who wanted to take VRS once due to family responsibilities, was persuaded by then CBI Director not to quit.
A few years ago, Ms Pahuja achieved a conviction is what was till then regarded as a blind case — the rape-murder of a Class 10 student in Himachal Pradesh.
The Gudiya case of 2017 had seared the hill state. The teen went missing while returning from school — the path went through a dense forest track where she was abducted. Her body was found two days later. She had been raped and strangled.
Anil Kumar, a woodcutter, was found guilty and sentenced to sentenced to life imprisonment in 2021.
In April 2018, the CBI had revealed how it cracked the case — using advanced DNA technology of percentage and lineage matching. After questioning over 1000 locals, they finally tested the DNA of over 250 people and found a match to forensic samples in the father of the accused. The son, who was out on bail and on the run, was later traced.
In the 2017 Unnao rape case too, the team had secured a conviction. BJP leader and local MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar — who was later expelled from the party — was given life term in jail for the gangrape of a 17-year-old Dalit girl.
He was also found guilty of the death of the girl’s father in judicial custody, for which he is serving a 10-year jail term.
In the 2020 Hathras case, which also generated headlines across the country, sparking massive public outrage, a 19-year-old girl was allegedly assaulted and gang-raped by four men of the so-called upper caste. A fortnight later, she succumbed to her injuries in Delhi’s Safdarjung Hospital.
What added to the public outrage was that her body was cremated by the Uttar Pradesh Police and the administration allegedly without the consent or the presence of her family.
Three of the four accused in the case have walked free. The fourth, Sandeep Thakur, has been convicted for culpable homicide not amounting to murder, and not of rape or murder.
The court had based its judgment on the mismatch between the woman’s statement and the forensic evidence. The police had claimed there was no evidence of rape and the woman had died of a neck injury.
The state police were accused of massive lapses at every stage of the case — starting with the delay in filing of the First Information Report, then denial of rape and the hurried cremation of the body. In face of the public outrage, on October 3, 2020, the state government had suspended five police officers including the Superintendent of Police.
