Free Aarushi by Avirook Sen Page A

on 16 May itself. Then she put the slides away in a steel almirah in her office along with all other slides.
    A couple of weeks later, when she was in Patna, she received a call about the slides from the CBI. She directed them to the almirah. Of the samples that went to the CFSL, a forensic scientist found traces of Aarushi’s DNA, but also DNA from another female source—given their handling, this would come as no surprise.
    This anomaly forced the CFSL to send the samples to Hyderabad’s CDFD for DNA testing in July 2008. The report from Hyderabad was even more troubling than the one from CFSL. It concluded that the DNA extracted was ‘not from the biological daughter of . . . Dr Rajesh Talwar . . . and Dr Nupur Talwar’.
    The traces of Aarushi’s DNA seem to have just disappeared at the Hyderabad lab. Now there was speculation that the slides had been swapped. Half-hearted inquiries about how this might have happened followed. But there was no real explanation by the CBI for the discrepancy. Some unnamed sources in the agency said that there had been a genuine mistake, that this wasn’t a cover-up. Others put out the story that the Talwars had used their ‘influence’ and were responsible for the ‘swap’.
    A layer of plausibility was added to this theory. The Talwars knew the pathologist Richa Saxena. Their children went to the same school, and Saxena had once interacted with them on a dental matter. That interaction could hardly have been termed ‘friendly’, according to the Talwars. In fact, it was a dispute over a bill. But things were even more complicated than that. Richa Saxena also happened to be married to Dr Naresh Raj. A paediatrician by training, Dr Raj had conducted the post-mortem on Hemraj’s body, and appeared happy to fall in line with whatever investigators were saying. His wife, however, wasn’t going to be pressured. Saxena had a track record of standing up to this kind of thing. A few years ago, a powerful cartel of doctors who ran an illegal blood bank in Muzaffarnagar had tried to threaten her not to test blood samples that would incriminate them. They failed, and were eventually convicted.
    The CBI tried to discredit Saxena, saying she had discipline issues, and was in a running battle with her superiors at the government hospital.
    According to Saxena, her records were snatched from her in early April 2008—a month or so before the murders. She told CBI investigators that there were orders to bar her entry into the hospital so that she could be marked absent. In addition, the hospital administration had withheld her salary. She said she turned up for duty every day despite all this, and had taken her grievances to the Allahabad High Court.
    Saxena confirmed to the CBI that the samples the hospital received were stored unsealed—and that contamination could not be ruled out as a result. When investigators summoned her again a year later, in November 2009, she told them firmly that there was no foul play and that she was willing to go through a lie detector or any other test if required. But the thing to note here is that the CBI’s own lab, CFSL, had found Aarushi’s DNA on the slides. They had had custody of the material till that time. They had sent the slides to the Hyderabad lab; the Talwars had not.
    A whole new angle to the case seemed to be opening up, in which lay infinite avenues of speculation. New stories now began circulating: the Talwars had used their influence to swap samples to prevent the discovery of a sex act having been committed; Aarushi was adopted, which explained why her parents didn’t love her and eventually killed her. Arun Kumar had not succeeded in building a case against the servants. And now, in November 2008, there seemed to be evidence implicating the man whose release he had sought in July.
    Both the agency and the media turned their focus on the ‘biological daughter’ issue. Neither Arun Kumar nor anyone in his team noticed anything