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Journalism of Courage
The murder of a British national on honeymoon in a Brussels hotel,allegedly by her Indian doctor husband,has ended in a contradictory note from the Supreme Court 31 years later. In a judgment on Friday,the court upheld the husbands innocence while calling the crime undoubtedly the action of a depraved soul.
The SC termed the case of Dr Mahendra Singh Dahiya,an orthopaedic surgeon and a post-graduate from AIIMS,unusual and perhaps the first of its kind. He was charged with murdering his wife Namita,an accounts trainee with the BBC,and dumping her body parts in a lake nearby Hotel Arenberg and other corners of Brussels on the night of May 27-28,1979.
That same morning,the couple had been seen off by Namitas family at the Victoria Railway Station in London. A native of Sonepat in Haryana,Dahiya was at the time enrolled with the Royal National Institute of Orthopaedics in London and lived with his wifes family.
The prosecution version says that Dahiya strangled Namita as he bore a grudge against her for dancing with some boys at her sisters birthday party a few days back.
Following the incident,Dahiya returned to Namitas family with allegedly her blood-stained suitcase and clothes,and claimed she had run away. He was handed over to the London Police by Namitas father. The peculiarity which makes this murder case rather rare is not only the ghastly and brutal manner in which the offence is alleged to have been committed,but also the complexities in the case created by a number of unique factors, a Supreme Court bench of Justices B Sudershan Reddy and SS Nijjar recounted in their verdict.
The bench outlined the complex factors it had to overcome to reach the decision: The accused is an Indian. The victim is a British citizen of Indian origin. Investigation was conducted in three different countries. Belgium authorities started the investigation,Scotland Yard in London joined and the CBI ultimately filed a chargesheet on July 30,1985, the court detailed.
After a complicated trial which saw a large number of foreign nationals examined in either Belgium or England,the trial court on March 1,1999,found Dahiya guilty of murder and destruction of evidence. He was given a life sentence. But his appeal in the Delhi High Court went in his favour,with a clear acquittal in 2002,which prompted the CBI to move the apex court as a last resort.
