CBI now wants narco analysis of Talwars

NEW DELHI: In a dramatic twist to the Aarushi murder case, the CBI wants to do a narco test on her parents Rajesh and Nupur Talwar, putting the needle of suspicion back on the dentist couple from Noida who had earlier been given a clean chit by the investigating agency.
The turnaround has come in the form of an application the agency moved before a special CBI court in Ghaziabad a week ago seeking its permission to run a narco test on the Talwars whose teenage daughter Aarushi and domestic help Hemraj were killed in circumstances that had the country riveted.
While the Talwars have given their consent, the court has reserved its order on the application.
While this could just be a shot in the dark by investigators who continue to grope for clues to what has so far remained a "blind case", the application completes the shift in CBI's stand towards the Talwars since it cleared them in the case. Earlier, the couple was called for lie detector and brain mapping tests in 2009.
Nothing perhaps explains the about-turn better than what CBI director Ashwani Kumar had told TOI in an interview on August 9, 2008, days after taking over as the agency's new chief. "The best part is the clean chit to the girl's father, Rajesh Talwar, against whom there was no evidence. I highly appreciate the CBI for it. It would have shaken the very foundation of our society had he been falsely implicated," Kumar had said.
On Monday, CBI refused to comment on the latest turn in the case, saying the matter was "sub-judice".
Off-the-record, however, sources said the agency had never given any clean chit to Talwar and that they had only said in court that there was no evidence against him. "There's a new team now handling the case and they have certain doubts which they want to address through the narco test," said an official who did not want to be quoted.
If the court agrees, this would be the first time that the Talwars would be subjected to a narco test. The lie detector and brain mapping tests could not yield any evidence against them.
Satish Tamta, counsel for the Talwars, said, "Both of them have given their consent for the test CBI wants to conduct on them."
"The CBI had about a week back sought our consent to carry out narco tests. We have given our written consent as our final objective is to get the killers. We are suffering and if the CBI has any doubts, we are happy to help them," Rajesh Talwar told a news agency. "Last year too, we had given our consent for narco test but the CBI did brain mapping and lie detector test. After that they said the narco test was not needed.
Now they want it again and we have no problems with that," he added.
CBI's insistence on narco analysis for Talwar does appear strange also because this very test proved to be its undoing in the case against the other three accused -- Krishna, Raj Kumar and Vijay Mandal. They were said to have admitted killing Aarushi and Hemraj in the narco test but the case was still thrown out of the court because CBI couldn't find any corroborative evidence to back the test report.
Even if Talwar admits his role in the ghastly crime -- the best case scenario for the agency -- it may not find anything to back it. Narco analysis can be treated as evidence in court only if it is backed by corroborative evidence. To cite an example, if Talwar were to reveal the whereabouts of the weapon and CBI managed to recover it on the basis of the disclosure, it would become "an open and shut case" against Talwar.
While the UP police, which booked Talwar initially, was pilloried for "sabotaging" the case, the CBI investigations too has earned a lot of flak for how it has handled the case. Unlike his predecessor Vijay Shanker, Kumar was thought to have honestly admitted that there was little evidence against not just Talwar but also the other three men.
It was the CBI led by joint director Arun Kumar, the chief investigator, which in 2009 was emphasising before one and all that there was no need to conduct brain-mapping or narco-analysis on Talwar or his wife because they seemed innocent. The agency had to put up with criticism that Talwar had been let off without being subjected to narco-analysis even though the three other accused were made to take all the tests.
Krishna, Raj Kumar and Mandal were released on bail after the CBI couldn't file chargesheet against them in the mandatory 90-day period.