Saturday, May 26, 2012

Motive 'hole' in Shehla case

By Rasheed Kidwai

Bhopal, May 25: The CBI today filed its chargesheet in the murder of RTI activist Shehla Masood but legal experts claimed the agency had failed to substantiate its claim that jealousy arising out of a love triangle was the motive.

The key accused, Bhopal-based interior designer Zahida Pervez, 35, has been charged with murder and conspiracy but the agency has not named Bhopal's BJP MLA Dhruv Narain Singh, whose name had figured in earlier CBI briefings and media reports on the murder.

Shehla, 38, was shot outside her Bhopal home on August 16 morning last year, the immediate suspicion linking the murder to her 40-odd RTI applications on the role of forest and police officials in tiger deaths.

However, in February, the CBI arrested Zahida and pointed to a crime of passion. It claimed that both Shehla and Zahida were in a relationship with Dhruv, 62, and that the interior designer had hired contract killers through her associate Saba Farooqui to murder her "rival".

The chargesheet, filed with the CBI court in Indore, accuses Saba and the alleged killers ' Saqib "Danger", Irfan and Tabish ' of murder, conspiracy and destruction of evidence. Like Zahida, the four men are in custody.

However, Shehla's family and close friends insist that she had never had an affair with Dhruv and that Zahida could have had no reason to kill her. They said Shehla had moved to Delhi almost two years before her murder and was in a relationship with a BJP member of Parliament. Besides, they said, Shehla and Zahida hardly knew each other.

The only purported evidence that the CBI has offered about Dhruv and Shehla being lovers are the telephone calls they reportedly exchanged, most of them made by the politician.

Legal experts in Bhopal say they are appalled that the CBI has failed to establish a clear motive. "If Dhruv was not involved with Shehla," one of them said, "why would Zahida attempt to eliminate her?"

The CBI appears to have better proof of the relationship between Zahida, a mother of two, and Dhruv. The agency has seized Zahida's telltale diary that officials say contains graphic accounts of her many sexual encounters.

However, the sleuths claim, the diary makes no reference to Dhruv in any of the entries that appear related to Shehla's murder.

On the day of the murder, Zahida is said to have written that Saqib had called her around 11.15am and said: "Mubarak ho! Ghar ke samne kaam ho gaya (Congrats! The job has been done right outside the house).''

However, Zahida's diary doesn't mention Dhruv even once in the entire month of August 2011, CBI officials say.

In the months after the murder, the CBI had grilled the MLA for hours and subjected him to a lie-detector test. Now the agency seems to have given him a clean chit, saying his only fault was that he had been a reckless Casanova.

The above is from my Yahoo mailbox

Have you ever seen an India politician being convicted.

It is not that they are honest.

They are the worst scums in society. Rather it is one of the qualifications required to be a politician.

You have to be a scum.

Rather, the system has been so designed by the politicians themselves that all probes on them are scuttled.

So, how could the CBI find anything wrong in this BJP politician in a BJP ruled state.

It seems if the truth is to be found, the media will have to take up the case and the Supreme Court will have to interfere.

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