The Allahabad High Court is likely to deliver its judgment on an appeal challenging the verdict of a CBI court which found Rajesh and Nupur Talwar guilty for the murder of their daughter Aarushi and domestic help Hemraj

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Allahabad High Court has observed in its judgment that the circumstantial evidence provided by the CBI is insufficient to convince the court that the Talwars were indeed guilty. The court also said that the basic legal tenets state that an accused is innocent until proven guilty. The court's order also negates CBI courts observation that since Talwars were the only people present in the house at the time of the murder, the burden of furnishing satisfactory proof of their innocence lied with them.

According to CNN-News 18, CBI sources have said that the investigation team is already considering moving the Supreme Court against the acquittal of Rajesh and Nupur Talwar. The sources said that the same set of evidence has elicited varying reactions from the judiciary. The trial court had earlier found Aarushi's parents guilty of the dual murder and of trying to destroy crucial evidence in the case.

The body of Aarushi was brought back to the residence of Dr Rajesh Talwar by aroudn 7.30pm. After keeping the body there for about half an hour, the body was taken to the cremation ground in Noida where the last rites of Aarushi were carried out. As sson as the body of Aarushi was taken for cremation, the staff of Dr. Rajesh Talwar and Dr. Nupur Talwar showed undue haste in thoroughly cleaning the floor and walls of Aarushi's room with soap and water. The blood stained mattress on the bed of Aarushi and other blood stained articles were carried by them to the terrace. On finding the terrace door locked, they asked for the key of the terrace door of the adjacent flat belonging to Shri Puneesh Tandon. The blood stained mattress etc. were thrown on the terrace of Shri Puneesh Tandon and the terrace door was locked.

"We concluded that since it was impossible for awake and alert officers to hear sounds from Aarushiâs room, it would have been impossible for the Talwars to hear anything that night. Then the narco tests also proved they showed no deception. So there was no evidence to incriminate them," Kumar told The Quint in an interview.

The criminal justice system of India is an accused-centred process and not a victim-centred one. This means that the focus of the judicial process is only the determination of the guilt of the accused and not finding the actual perpetrator of the criminal act. This means that after this verdict, unless and until there is again a fresh investigation, the murderer of Aarushi and Hemraj will remain unknown.

The case previously saw three full investigations. One was by the Uttar Pradesh Police and the other two by the CBI. Only the second investigation exonerated the couple and the rest two charged them with double murder. It was indeed strange that the third investigation, which was the second one by CBI had charged the Talwar duo for the double murder when it was only them who had opposed the filing of the closure report by the same agency.

The denouement of the case is absolutely shocking. In spite of throwing the best agencies and investigators into the case, a murder that happened in an apartment — not, mind you, in some remote corner of India — in the National Capital Region has not been cracked. This when the number of suspects, the possible permutations and combinations, and the motive could have been limited.

"I don't know what else to say.. what should I do. How can you think that we could kill our child. Why wouldn't people believe us. I would put this on record here that we never touched the crime scene after we found Aarushi there," Nupur had said.

"We didn’t believe that her parents could be her killers because they seemed just as concerned and loving as anybody else's parents. We used to see them regularly at PTA meetings or when they came to pick her up from school. We also didn't believe that she was sexually involved with her servant because she was an attractive girl and many guys crushed over her," she says.

The Allahabad High Court in its judgment has also hit out at the trial judge who had given the earlier verdict in this case. "The trial judge is unmindful of the basic tenets of law," CNN-News18 quoted the high court as saying. "The judge adopted a partial and parochial approach to vent his own beliefs," the court said, adding that the trial judge acted with "extra zeal and enthusiasm" and "gave shape to imagination stripped of facts".

"The sort of love and respect we got in jail, we probably didn't get it even outside it. The world here is less judgmental, they don't question your character. The manner in which we were accused, the way in which people character-assassinated Aarushi...all this didn't happen here. People just accepted us. They gave us emotional support when we most wanted it. They always consoled us, that one day this prison sentence will end and we’ll walk out of this jail."

Now, why did the agency leave the heads of the golf clubs uncovered? The DNA evidence (if any) would have been on the head of the golf club, but the agency failed to preserve the evidence resulting in the evidence being tampered with. There is a rule in Indian Law called the best evidence rule. What it means is if one is leading evidence about something, it must be the best available evidence that they can lead. But in this case, by failing to preserve the evidence, the agency failed to ensure that the best evidence was available. This put the entire DNA report in doubt. Though they also failed to establish the golf club was the weapon used to commit the crime.

The judgment also notes that the investigating agency tampered with the evidence during the course of the investigation . The State claimed that a golf club was used to effect the murder, but the golf club was not kept properly during the course of the investigation and the court explicitly records that it was tampered with.

The Allahabad High Court is likely to deliver its judgment on an appeal challenging the verdict of a CBI court which found Rajesh and Nupur Talwar guilty for the murder of their daughter Aarushi and domestic help Hemraj in 2008. A division bench of the high court comprising justices BK Narayana and AK Mishra had reserved the judgment on 7 September on the appeal filed by the dentist couple, fixing 12 October as the date for the verdict.

They are currently serving their sentence in Ghaziabad's Dasna jail. Fourteen-year-old Aarushi was found dead inside her room in the Talwars' Noida residence with her throat slit in May 2008. The needle of suspicion had initially moved towards 45-year-old Hemraj, who had gone missing, but his body was recovered from the terrace of the house two days later. As the Uttar Pradesh Police drew flak over the shoddy investigation into the case which was making national headlines, the then Chief Minister Mayawati handed over the probe to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). Though a special CBI court in Ghaziabad in an 210-page exhaustive order had sentenced the couple with life imprisonment on 26 November 2013, a day after their conviction in the case, reports have claimed several discrepancies in the investigation that led to the couple's conviction in the case. In 2014, former CBI Director AP Singh had said there were "lacunae" in the probe carried out by the first CBI team under the then joint director Arun Kumar. Singh had said that Kumar was convinced that the parents of Aarushi were responsible for the double murder. In 2015, an hour-long video reportedly surfaced on YouTube which shows Krishna, Talwar's assistant, purportedly saying that Kumar asked him to own up the crime on the promise of getting his sentence reduced. Despite the conviction, the family members and friends of the Talwars continued to insist that the couple didn't commit the murder. In an open letter in 2015, Aarushi's grandfather had reportedly questioned the character assassination of Aarushi and her parents by the media and even the judgment that sent them to jail on a life term. The murder case also inspired a book and a film, both of which weighed in favour of the Talwars, thus giving rise to debate over the case. The Allahabad court's judgment is likely to bring fresh clarity on the case, and whether or not a grave injustice was done to the Talwars, as the couple's family and some legal experts have opined in the past. With inputs from PTI