Among other things, the inquiry, promised three months ago, was expected to look into allegations of local police not acting promptly enough to save the child after she went missing.
Kathua: Chief minister Mehbooba Mufti Saturday said she would seek a fast-track 90-day trial in the Kathua gang rape and murder case even as her government is yet to order the magisterial inquiry it had promised in January into the alleged lapses in the initial investigation.
The inquiry was supposed to be conducted by the Kathua deputy commissioner.
“I read in the newspapers that a magisterial probe has been announced in the assembly. But no official orders were sent to me to conduct the probe,” Rohit Khajuria, Kathua deputy commissioner, told ThePrint Friday.
With police investigating the criminal aspect of the episode, the magisterial inquiry was expected to look into allegations of local police not acting promptly enough to save the child, and senior officers’ lack of sensitivity in dealing with the case. It was also to probe claims that local police deliberately avoided the site where she was kept after her alleged abduction during their search after she was reported missing.
Kathua police personnel are also accused of destroying crucial evidence.
On 19 January, amid an opposition onslaught over the issue two days after the victim’s body was discovered, state minister Abdul Rehman Veeri had said the Kathua deputy commissioner would conduct a probe into the crime. He repeated the promise on 20 January. “We have ordered a magisterial inquiry into the brutal abduction and killing of the girl. We will inform the house about the findings of the inquiry and nobody will be spared,” he had said.
It was the opposition’s protest in the house that led the government to suspend the Hiranagar station house officer (SHO), in charge of Rasana village, where the crime occurred, days after the child’s body was found.
What local police are accused of
The eight-year-old victim is believed to have been abducted on 10 January while out to graze her family’s horses, and raped by two men and a juvenile over three days before being strangled. She was allegedly kept at a local temple till she was killed on 14 January. Her mutilated body was discovered on 17 January in a forest in Rasana.
Of the eight people identified as suspects in the Jammu & Kashmir crime branch’s two chargesheets (police filed an individual chargesheet against the juvenile), four are police personnel.
Hiranagar special police officer (SPO) Deepak Khajuria, believed to have been involved in the abduction conspiracy from the start, is also one of the suspects accused of gang rape.
Two others have been arrested for allegedly trying to destroy evidence for bribe money. They are Anand Dutta, the investigating officer (IO) of the case before it was shifted to the crime branch, and head constable Tilak Raj. The fourth, special police officer Surinder Kumar, is accused of being an accessory.
Dutta and Khajuria were part of the team that conducted the search for the girl after she was reported missing.
According to the J&K police crime branch chargesheet, Dutta “deliberately did not conduct the search of the Devsthan for tracing the missing girl… He did not even search the premises and other suspected installation/houses in the vicinity from where the girl had gone missing.”
The personnel allegedly also overlooked/destroyed vital evidence, even washing the clothes of the victim and eliminating her vaginal slides. According to the chargesheet, “The IO remained very casual and left serious lapses deliberately in order to help the accused.”
It was reported Saturday that the four police personnel named in the J&K police crime branch chargesheet are being terminated from service.
Before the case was handed over to the crime branch on 23 January, Hiranagar police initially apprehended a neighbour of the victim’s family who was believed to have had a fight with her father a few days before she went missing. However, he was let off after questioning.
According to the chargesheet, IO Dutta then picked up the juvenile suspect and took him to the forest where the child’s body was found to click staged photographs of him with the evidence, an alleged bid to frame him as the sole suspect.
A few days later, following a massive protest by locals alleging the juvenile could not have committed the crime alone, a special investigation team (SIT) was constituted under the Samba assistant superintendent of police, but the case was subsequently handed over to the crime branch.
With inputs from Rahiba R. Parveen in New Delhi
The criminal probe now supersedes the magisterial enquiry the DC could have conducted. Asifa’s family has said that in their own frantic search for the missing child, the temple is one place they excluded. No one could have expected that it would be the location of all that happened. Some very fine investigative work by the police and concerted reporting by the media has led to a comprehensive charge sheet being filed. Given the forces at work, the whole case would have been botched up. As would Unnao.