Aarushi Talwar murder case verdict as it happened: Talwars 'not guilty' but they aren't proven innocent, says ex-CBI officer

The Allahabad High Court is likely to deliver its judgment on an appeal challenging the verdict of a CBI court which found Rajesh and Nupur Talwar guilty for the murder of their daughter Aarushi and domestic help Hemraj in 2008. A division bench of the high court comprising justices BK Narayana and AK Mishra had reserved the judgment on 7 September on the appeal filed by the dentist couple, fixing 12 October as the date for the verdict.

They are currently serving their sentence in Ghaziabad’s Dasna jail. Fourteen-year-old Aarushi was found dead inside her room in the 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 the shoddy investigation into the case which was making national headlines, the then Chief Minister Mayawati handed over the probe to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). Though a special CBI court in Ghaziabad in an 210-page exhaustive order had sentenced the couple with life imprisonment on 26 November 2013, a day after their conviction in the case, reports have claimed several discrepancies in the investigation that led to the couple’s conviction in the case. In 2014, former CBI Director AP Singh had said there were “lacunae” in the probe carried out by the first CBI team under the then joint director Arun Kumar. Singh had said that Kumar was convinced that the parents of Aarushi were responsible for the double murder. In 2015, an hour-long video reportedly  surfaced on YouTube which shows Krishna, Talwar’s assistant, purportedly saying that Kumar asked him to own up the crime on the promise of getting his sentence reduced. Despite the conviction, the family members and friends of the Talwars continued to insist that the couple didn’t commit the murder. In an open letter in 2015, Aarushi's grandfather  had reportedly questioned the character assassination of Aarushi and her parents by the media and even the judgment that sent them to jail on a life term. The murder case also inspired a book and a film, both of which weighed in favour of the Talwars, thus giving rise to debate over the case. The Allahabad court’s judgment is likely to bring fresh clarity on the case, and whether or not a grave injustice was done to the Talwars, as the couple’s family and some legal experts have opined in the past. With inputs from PTI