How Jigisha’s parents solved murder mystery of daughter, Soumya Vishwanathan

Sabita Ghosh said police initially refused to file a case when her daughter Jigisha went missing six months after television journalist Vishwanathan’s murder

Between September 30, 2008, and March 18, 2009, the national capital was rocked by the brutal murders of two young working women. Sabita and Jagannath Ghosh’s only daughter, Jigisha, was strangled to death on March 18, 2009, nearly six months after journalist Soumya Vishwanathan was shot dead by the same men. Sabita’s persistent pursuit of truth led to Soumya’s murder being solved, alongside her own daughter’s, amid what she alleged were months of police apathy.

Jigisha Ghosh was strangled to death on March 18, 2009, nearly six months after journalist Soumya Vishwanathan was shot dead by the same men (HT Archive)

On Wednesday, as she heard that Ravi Kapoor, Amit Shukla, Ajay Kumar and Baljeet Malik were convicted for Soumya’s murder, Sabita felt a sense of vindication and relief. The four men accused of abducting, robbing and killing her daughter, Jigisha Ghosh, in 2009, were convicted for killing Soumya.

Sabita said the convictions will never bring her daughter back but it took away her pain a little. “My daughter had asked me to ready breakfast. But she did not return home. When I visited the Vasant Vihar police station, the police refused to register a missing persons report. Instead, they told me that my daughter must have eloped,” alleged Sabita.

Sabita said she was pressured to call a relative who knew the then Lok Sabha speaker Somnath Chatterjee. With Chatterjee’s intervention, a missing case was registered at Vasant Kunj police station, she said. “I will never forget Somnath ji for his intervention. We had lost all hope of a police action,” she said.

Around 4.30am on March 18, 2009, Jigisha—an operations manager with Hewitt Associates in Noida—got off her office cab at the colony. She was talking on the phone in front of her residence, assisting a colleague in sorting out a “technical problem”, and had not gone up to her first-floor flat where the mobile signal was patchy. The four men, who were returning drunk from a late-night party, spotted her. They called out to her on the pretext of finding out an address, and then pulled her inside their silver grey Santro car bearing a Haryana registration.

The accused then forced her to divulge her ATM pin and withdrew money even as she pleaded with them to let her go. “After driving for an hour, Kapoor decided to kill her, as he feared that she could recognise them later,” the then DCP (south) HGS Dhaliwal had said. After dumping her body in Faridabad, all four went to Sarojini Nagar market and purchased expensive things like watches and shoes with her card.

Jigisha’s body was found amid the bushes on the Surajkund Road in Faridabad two days later, but the killers had remained elusive. It was then that Sabita decided to look for clues about what happened to her daughter. “My daughter would share her online banking passwords. I checked her account to find ₹1.5 lakh was spent after her disappearance. That was shocking,” she said.

Sabita visited the bank branch in Munirka and convinced the manager to share the details of the expenses from Jigisha’s account, which led the parents to a few shops in Sarojini Nagar.

“When I saw the signature on Jigisha’s debit card receipt, I knew it was not hers. She signed horizontally but the signature on the receipt was vertical. The shopkeeper also confirmed that there were three men who had visited the shop and no woman accompanied them,” Sabita added. She and her husband returned to the Vasant Kunjpolice station with this information. “Police then pursued the information furnished by us to find CCTV footage that offered clues about the killers’ identities,” she said.

It was sheer coincidence that Jigisha and Soumya were both murdered by the same men within a radius of a kilometer. While being interrogated for Jigisha’s murder, the accused confessed to having killed Soumya six months before.

In July 2016, the accused were convicted by a lower court for Jigisha’s murder, but the death sentence awarded to two of them—Kapoor and Shukla—was commuted to life sentence by the Delhi high court in 2018. The court upheld the life imprisonment of the third convict, Malik.

Sabita, now 65, and riddled with age-related illnesses, said that she has never really been able to recover from the mercy granted to her daughter’s killers. “Their conviction in Soumya’s case was only a matter of time. But if they are granted the death sentence, my pain will reduce a little,” Sabita said. She said she never had doubts about their guilt. “They are hardcore criminals with no sympathy, no sense of shame, no guilt and no compassion,” she said.