Sheena Bora case: CBI court rejects Peter Mukerjea's request to access case dairy

The special CBI court today rejected the application of Peter Mukerjea, one of the accused in the 2012 Sheena Bora murder case.

The former television head honcho had filed an application seeking case diary and dairies maintained by individual investigators. One of the dairies contained details of investigation on Shyamvar Rai.

Rai, former driver of Mukerjea is an accused in the Sheena Bora murder case and was present when Peter's wife Indrani and her ex-husband Sanjeev Khanna strangulated her to death. Rai had later turned into an approver in the case.

The sensational murder case would have been inconclusive if Rai was not arrested on August 21, 2015. He was arrested by Khar Police after he was caught with a pistol during a nakabandi.

Incidentally during interrogation, Rai revealed chilling details of the sensational murder case. Police has already filed chargesheet in the case of illegal pistol possession against Rai. Peter allegedly sought the case dairies pertaining to Rai's arrest.

Peter had made this application earlier as well in the sessions court which had rejected it. Peter subsequently filed an appeal against the rejections in the Bombay High Court.

However, the high court asked him to approach the special CBI court and ask them to decide on his application afresh. The CBI court too snubbed his request.

Peter's lawyer Shrikant Shived told the CBI court that his client needed the documents citing several Supreme Court judgments supporting his right to seek the information.

However, the CBI advocates Bharat Badami and Kavita Patil told the court that existence of a weekly and personal diaries was a figment of imagination of the defense.

The court in its order said, "as far as station diary is concerned, it is clear that the station diary which contains previous statements of witnesses can be produced for the purpose of contradiction or impeaching the prosecution witnesses when the court deems it necessary. However, in the present case the station diary in Rai's Arms Act case does not contain previous statements of police witnesses,  police officers Ganesh Dalvi and Dinesh Kadam. Therefore, in view of the apex court's observations it is not necessary and desirable to call for it."

The court has accepted this argument of the CBI. And with this the court said that there is not desirable purpose to call for diary maintained by Dalvi and Kadam in Rai's case.