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CBI inquiry Arnav Duggal case: Calling the police’s probe over the death of a 23-year-old hotel manager in 2017 “lackadaisical”, the Delhi High Court recently transferred the case to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).
Justice Tushar Rao Gedela was hearing the petition filed by the mother of Arnav Duggal, who was found dead in his apartment in Delhi in June 2017 under mysterious and suspicious circumstances.
“Investigations lack bona fide and appear to have been conducted myopically, that too, predicated only on the theory of suicide as stated by the woman without applying its investigative or analytical and scientific mind to the circumstances noted in the preceding paragraphs,” the court said on November 27.
The order continued, “It is not as if this court is goading or coaxing the prosecution to consider the ingredients of offence under Section 306 (abetment of suicide) IPC, but it is only a pointer as to how the investigations or in other words, the lackadaisical nature in which the investigations have been carried out.”
According to the petitioner, at the time of death, the woman with whom her son was allegedly in a relationship was with him, but the probe agencies investigated the case under the assumption of suicide and not murder.
Senior advocate Siddharth Aggarwal, who represented the mother, argued that the assumption of suicide, which formed the basis of the investigation commenced and concluded by the prosecution, had resulted in miscarriage of justice.
He contended that there is no credible knowledge, information or even evidence collected by the investigating authorities to reach this assumption of suicide from the very inception of the investigation.
He pointed to the discrepancies in the woman’s version, time of the discovery of the body and photographs of the crime scene including the non-registration of FIR by the investigative authorities.
The mother’s plea said that the police faltered in their investigation since they “presumed” that the death of her son was suicide, and not murder.
It added that such an assumption emanated from the version given by the woman with whom her son was allegedly in a relationship and she was the only person admittedly present in the flat when he committed suicide.
The petition called the investigation “unfair, tainted, mala fide and smacks of foul play”, requiring a CBI probe.
Government counsel Anmol Sinha, on the other hand, refuted the allegations and contentions of the petitioner.
Sinha submitted that the version put forth by the petitioner was a result of an imagination far from the truth and devoid of any merit on account of lack of evidence, whether oral or documentary.
The court observed that it was the bounden duty of the investigating agencies to, at the first instance, rule out or eliminate any offence, which may be attracted in given facts and circumstances of a particular case.
“In the present case, even if one may presume that an offence under Section 302 IPC, in all probability, may not find a foundation but whether the purported suicide is voluntary or there could be an element of abetment, has not at all been looked into by the prosecution. Rather, that aspect was completely ignored, willfully or otherwise,” it noted.
