It is an unending wait for justice for the parents of Ayesha Meera, a 19-year-old pharmacy student who was raped and murdered inside her hostel in Vijayawada 13 years ago.
The case saw many twists and turns over the years, and is now being probed by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) after the victim’s parents filed a petition in the High Court.
The 19-year-old, a resident of Guntur district, was murdered inside her room at the Sri Durga Ladies Hostel at Ibrahimpatnam on the night of December 26, 2007. Her body was found in a toilet on the second floor of the hostel building.
Police who arrived at the scene found her head smashed in and her clothes soaked in blood. They collected follicles, blood samples and other evidence from the crime scene.
In 2008, a man named Pidatala Satyam Babu, who was an accused in a cell phone theft case, was arrested by the police and charged with the murder. In 2010, the Mahila Sessions Court in Vijayawada found Satyam Babu guilty and awarded him life imprisonment.
After a year, Satyam Babu filed an appeal in the High Court at Hyderabad, pleading innocence. In April 2017, he was acquitted by the High Court and directed the police to launch a fresh investigation into the case.
The court pulled up the investigating officers over the botched-up probe and directed the government to take action against the police officers who were in charge of the investigation.
The State government later constituted a Special Investigation Team (SIT) to re-investigate the case, under the supervision of the High Court. Later, the court handed over the case to the CBI in November 2018 after a petition was filed in this regard by the victim’s parents, and directed the Central agency to also probe the aspect of missing evidence related to the case that was destroyed.
The CBI’s Visakhapatnam branch booked cases against the trial court employees in Vijayawada, namely Y. Subba Reddy (superintendent) and P. Venkata Kumar and T. Kumari (junior assistants), under Sections 120-B (criminal conspiracy), 201 (causing disappearance of evidence), 409 (criminal breach of trust by a public servant and Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988.
In December 2019, CBI officials exhumed Meera’s body from a graveyard in Tenali and conducted a second post-mortem. They questioned a few persons, including the local police in the case, and the investigation is still ongoing.