Peter to be produced in court today, onus now on CBI to prove charges
MUMBAI: All eyes would be on the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) when it produces former media baron Peter Mukerjea for his alleged complicity in Sheena Bora’s murder before the court on Monday. The key question is whether the CBI will be able to substantiate the charges of conspiracy levelled against Peter or will the CBI file a discharge application that would absolve Peter of the charges.
But CBI sources said it is highly unlikely that the agency would let Peter off the hook as it continued to question the former media baron and pile evidences against him. The CBI has found that Peter, who was in United Kingdom and then holidaying with his adopted daughter Vidhie in Rome, had come to Mumbai on April 28, 2012, three days after Sheena was murdered and her body was disposed in a thickly forested area in Raigad.
After disposing Sheena’s body, Indrani, her ex-husband Sanjeev Khanna and driver Shyamwar Rai had returned to Mumbai. On April 27, 2012 Indrani and Khanna had left for Kolkatta. But the very next day Indrani returned to Mumbai to receive Peter, and then the same day both of them went to Goa.
CBI wants to have more clarity on why Peter, who was holidaying with Vidhi in Rome, returned to Mumbai three days after the murder. CBI has found that Peter and Indrani stayed in Goa till May 1, before returning to Mumbai and taking a flight to the UK.
Peter complicity in Sheena’s murder was nailed after Rahul Mukerjea, his son from his first wife Shabnam, showed CBI officials mobile phone conversations of Peter and Indrani that he had recorded on his Blackberry mobile phone.
In the conversations, Peter had told Rahul that he had talked with Sheena who had been sent to Los Angeles, said CBI sources. It was the theory that Indrani had planned after she killed Sheena in 2012. Rahul had saved the conversations after his mother Shabnam had advised him to do so, and had kept the mobile phone till the murder case was detected. Rahul has given the phone to CBI which will be part of the evidence.
This was after he got a text message from her mobile phone, a couple of days after she had left him to meet her mother on April 24, 2012 —the day Sheena was murdered — saying she was breaking up with him. Rahul’s calls to the number went unanswered. According to sources close to the investigation, Rahul then called up Indrani who told him Sheena had gone away to the US.
Rahul told CBI officials that Sheena’s passport was with him, and there was no way Sheena could have left for the US and that it had raised suspicion.
But Rahul, CBI officials said, Rahul gave up the search for Sheena after he got a message from Sheena’s mobile phone that she had decided to break their relationship, and later when Peter had called him to tell him about Sheena’s location in Los Angeles.