'Our Aarushi wasn't like that': Friends recall nightmare

NOIDA: It's been nine years since a group of schoolkids found themselves in the media glare, answering questions about their murdered friend and leading protest marches. Aarushi's classmate Rajeswari Sahay remembers the period as a "harrowing experience".

When many others chose to keep silent, some, among them Sahay and Fiza Jha, both childhood friends of Aarushi, spoke to the media, to investigators and at protests. Sahay, now 23, is a communications executive in a private company in Mumbai. She said on Thursday their enthusiasm to fight for Aarushi dimmed when they began to feel justice would not be delivered following the CBI court verdict in November 2013.

Watch: Timeline of the Aarushi murder case

"The character assassination of someone who is no longer alive is not right. I think the projection of a thirteen-year-old in the media as someone who could have a physical relationship with someone as old as Hemraj was presumptuous," Sahay told TOI.



She decried that the investigators had leaked details of Aarushi's personal messages and online chats on Orkut. "We were very young at the time, almost kids," said Sahay. "Since I too was an only child, I connected with Aarushi. She was a reasonably popular girl in school and didn't need to do anything of the sort suggested by police."

Aarushi Talwar murder trial: How it unfolded

Sahay was referring to the disclosure of messages like "I won't do this again" that Aarushi wrote to her father after an outing with friends without a chaperone. This and many other messages had been leaked to the media, including those she exchanged with a male friend in school.

Students remember Aarushi as a brilliant girl and insisted that the parents were implicated in her murder. "My family knew the Talwars very well. It was just not who they were, the kind of background they came from," said Sahay.

Now that the court has acquitted the couple, Sahay said that it seemed the issue had never been to find out who was behind the double-murder, but only to determine whether the parents had done it. "If uncle and aunty did not do it, where are the ones who were involved?" the 23-year-old asked on Thursday.

This question continues to baffle. Tanveer Ahmed Mir, the Talwars' lawyer, told TOI that while delivering the verdict, Allahabad High Court noted that the CBI's theory that no one had entered the house where the murders took place did not hold ground. "The court said that the entry of another person could not be ruled out," Mir said.

Meanwhile, Naresh Yadav, who had deposed for Krishna, Vijay Mandal and Rajkumar, the three servants accused of the crime by the first CBI investigation, said that they had returned to Nepal from where they had come. "This verdict has shocked us. We will appeal in the Supreme Court," Yadav told TOI.

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