Investigation into Jiah Khan’s death was ‘fair and impartial’
INDIA’S federal investigating agency, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), carried out a “fair, impartial and thorough” probe into the death by suicide of actress Jiah Khan, but her mother Rabia Khan has attempted to “delay the trial by insisting it was homicide”, the Bombay high court said last week.
Khan, 25, was found dead in her home in Mumbai in June 2013. She grew up in London and made her debut in the Hindi film industry in 2007 with Ram Gopal Varma’s Nishabd. She played the 18-year-old female lead opposite Indian superstar Amitabh Bachchan, in a movie loosely based on Vladimir Nabokov’s classic novel Lolita.
At the time of her death, police had questioned Sooraj Pancholi, Khan’s boyfriend at the time and the son of actor couple Aditya Pancholi and Zarina Wahab, to whom she had made her last phone call.
Last month, in an order dated September 12, a division bench of two justices dismissed a petition filed by her mother seeking a fresh probe into the case, preferably by the FBI, the domestic intelligence and security service
of the United States.
A copy of the detailed order was made available last Tuesday (27). The bench said it could not direct the FBI to investigate the case. It is currently being probed by the CBI, which charged Pancholi, for abetting her death by suicide in 2013. Rabia claims her daughter was murdered.
In its order, the Bombay high court said a detailed investigation was carried out by the CBI and it concluded that it was a case of suicide.
“Repeated insistence of the petitioner to procure a finding from the court that death of the victim, in this case, was homicidal and not suicidal is a clear indication of procrastinating the trial,” the court said.
“This conduct of the petitioner amounts to unnecessarily procrastinating and delaying the trial which is in progress before the trial court. It appears that petitioner wants this court to return a finding in her favour that the death of the victim was homicidal and not suicidal, even before the trial is over.
“Prima facie it does appear that a totally impartial, fair and transparent investigation is made by the CBI in a thorough manner,” the bench said.