New Delhi: Nearly a year after Rajesh and Nupur Talwar were set free by the Allahabad high court, in the Aarushi Talwar-Hemraj double murder case of 2008, the Supreme Court, on Friday, admitted the plea by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), challenging the couple’s acquittal.
Challenging the acquittal, the CBI said the Allahabad HC had erred in reversing the “well-reasoned order of a Ghaziabad trial court.
A bench of Justices Ranjan Gogoi, Navin Sinha and K.M Joseph said that the appeal would be heard along with a petition filed by Hemraj’s wife.
In December 2017, Hemraj’s wife— Khumkala Banjade—filed a petition in the Supreme Court, challenging the Allahabad high court’s verdict, claiming that the Talwars had been wrongly acquitted.
The Supreme Court has also issued a notice to the Talwars.
A CBI court in Ghaziabad had found the Talwars guilty of the Aarushi-Hemraj double murder and sentenced them to life imprisonment on 25 November 2013, following which they were lodged in Ghaziabad’s Dasna jail.
On 12 October last year, the Allahabad high court said there was no evidence against Talwars that pointed to the fact that they were guilty of the double murders at their home in Uttar Pradesh’s Noida.
The couple was acquitted of all charges by the Allahabad high court in October 2017.
The court had said the prosecution had failed to establish its hypothesis that the parents, who were the only ones at home at the time, had committed the murders.
The bench of Justices B K Narayana and A K Mishra, in a 273-page order, said “suspicion, however grave it may be, cannot take the place of proof, and, in this case, neither the circumstances nor the evidence was enough to hold them guilty.”
Aarushi Talwar, 13, was found with her throat slit in her room at the Talwars’ residence in Noida on 16 May 2008. While the U.P. police initially suspected 45-year-old Hemraj—the family’s domestic help—Hemraj’s body was found on the Talwar’s terrace two days later.