CM: WhatsApp message helped us solve case of Darrang girl’s death

Guwahati: The unnatural death of the 13-year-old girl in Assam’s Darrang district on June 11 would have remained a suicide case, but for a WhatsApp message from a journalist on August 12 that caught chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma’s attention.
What followed after Sarma’s intervention was a re-investigation by CID that uncovered chilling details of sexual assault and murder of the minor Christian girl allegedly by the owner of the house where she was employed as a maid.
Sarma said it was a ‘sanjog’ (destiny) that he stopped at that particular message while scrolling through WhatsApp.
“I saw the message around 2.30am. It was from a journalist. Every day I get about 1000 messages. I do not read all of them, sometimes 10 or 20. God took me to this particular message. I thought it was sanjog when I saw it. I immediately asked my office to seek a report from the Darrang SP. I had doubts when police arrested the accused after the SP received the message from my office seeking his report. I knew something was wrong. I called the DGP and told him that we are going to the girl’s house in the morning,” Sarma said.
After his ground assessment of the situation, Sarma ordered the suspension of the SP and the ASP and asked the CID to form a SIT to re-investigate the case. The re-investigation exposed a dark side of the police, the bureaucracy and the medical fraternity. A special investigation team of CID arrested the SP, an additional SP, an executive magistrate and three doctors who performed the post-mortem for taking bribes to shield the accused.
The CID, using modern technology like geolocation tracking system to find the evidence of money trail, forensic technology to get the vital evidences after recreating the crime at the crime scene, took the help of experts from AIIMS, the GMC and NEIGRIHMS and exhumed the victim’s body to carry out a second post-mortem.
The final reports, which were completely contrary to the earlier reports, concluded that the girl was hit on her skull by a blunt weapon and then strangulated with a coir rope to make it look like a suicide after she was sexually assaulted.
“We have completed our investigation which establishes that it was a case of murder and sexual assault and not suicide and also that the police officers, magistrate and the doctors compromised on the probe, but it is the court that will deliver the final verdict,” Sarma said.
He added, “The credit goes to the CID. I expressed my doubts and the CID could have defended the earlier findings of it being a case of suicide and told me that it was alright. But they took my doubts very seriously and re-investigated the case.”
Sarma said it was his duty to intervene when he believed that there was something wrong with the police investigation. “It is the duty of a CM to see and supervise any such lapses that come to his notice. Police have responsibility, but the ultimate supervisory responsibility lies on the CM’s table,” he said.