Free Aarushi by Avirook Sen

seem odd, given that there was almost non-stop coverage of the double murders at the time, but there was another reason why the case wasn’t part of any discussions between the outgoing director and the incumbent: there was no meeting between them.
    ‘I retired at the end of July and my successor joined about three days later,’ said Shanker.
    Within a week of his taking over, Ashwani Kumar held a meeting about the Noida double murder investigation. The media pressure was unrelenting, and the new director needed to get a grip on the case. At the meeting Ashwani Kumar said that he had watched Arun Kumar’s press conference of the previous month with rapt attention as an ordinary viewer, and felt it didn’t show the agency in a good light. This was because there had been several minutes of silence at the beginning of the press conference, during which Arun Kumar and others sat facing the cameras saying nothing. It made the CBI look tentative. This, the new director felt, was embarrassing.
    This silence had indeed filled out several minutes. It also had a simple explanation: some channels had set up their cameras and gone live, broadcasting pictures. Others were still sorting out their equipment and connections. Arun Kumar had no response to his director’s charge. But the first meeting on the Aarushi case hadn’t gone well.
    Through the month of August, Kumar and his team had worked on Vijay Mandal to turn approver, and testify against Krishna and Rajkumar. That deal was as good as struck; all that was required was the director’s approval. Ashwani Kumar was away in Kolkata when his approval was sought. He turned it down. Why?
    Arun Kumar’s track record had become the subject of rumour within the CBI. He had earlier investigated two high-profile cases: the Nithari murders and the killing of Rizwanur Rahman, a computer engineer who was allegedly murdered in Kolkata in 2007 after marrying Priyanka Todi, the industrialist Ashok Todi’s daughter. Though public perception was that the Todis had killed Rizwan and made it appear a suicide, the CBI finally found it to be a case of suicide. Similarly, in the Nithari murder case in Noida, in which remains of women and children were found in a drain behind Moninder Singh Pandher’s house, Kumar’s initial investigation found that only his servant Surinder Koli was the culprit.
    An impression may have been created about the cases Arun Kumar handled: the wealthy and powerful who were initially suspects in sensational cases managed to get off as innocent.
    Arun Kumar told me he was aware of these rumours. Ashwani Kumar would have been as well. From thinking he had the case wrapped up, the investigator found he was back where he had started. In early September, the three new suspects were released on bail, for lack of evidence against them.
    Kumar felt direct DNA or blood evidence was his best chance now. CFSL test results hadn’t yielded anything on any of the suspects. Dozens of samples had gone to the Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics (CDFD), Hyderabad. Kumar decided to lie low and await the reports from there.
    The most voluminous of these arrived in early November. And no sooner had they entered the CGO Complex than the scandalous part of the report was immediately leaked to the press. Aarushi’s vaginal swabs had been sent to the government lab in Noida after the post-mortem. Dr Sunil Dohare had not even marked them as Aarushi’s—he had just wrapped the slides in paper and handed them to a runner who took them to the pathologist Richa Saxena at the Government District Hospital, Sector 30, Noida. Why hadn’t Dohare at least marked the slides? In his fourth interview with the CBI, on 30 September 2009, Dohare calmly said, ‘There is no procedure of collection of swab in our district and in entire UP state.’
    Within hours of the post-mortem, Saxena received the samples. She tested them for semen and biological fluids, found none present, and sent her report