It wasn’t possible to prove who killed Jigisha, says Delhi Police investigator

While commuting the death sentence of two convicts in Jigisha Ghosh murder case, Delhi High Court said that it was proved that three accused were involved in the crime but who strangulated her was not clear

An investigator who pursued the case against Jigisha Ghosh’s killers said that there was no way they could establish without a doubt which of the three actually strangulated the woman.

Jigisha Ghosh, a 28-year-old IT executive, was abducted and murdered in March 2009 from near her house in south Delhi’s Vasant Kunj after her office cab dropped her back around 4 am. (HT Photo)

“Jigisha was strangulated to death. There was no other weapon used in the murder so it was not possible for us to gather fingerprints. So, there is no way to scientifically establish who actually killed Jigisha,” said an investigator directly associated with the probe.

While commuting the death penalty to life imprisonment for Jigisha’s killers, the Delhi High Court had pointed out that it was not clear as to which of the three convicts — whether all of them or only some of them — actually committed the murder. “What is proved beyond doubt is that all of them were involved in the crime,” the high court said.

“Since the court upheld their involvement in the crime, it shows that we did not lack in our investigations. We proved that all the three men had a common intention of killing her (Jigisha). After that, it is a matter of interpretation and the court’s job to judge whether it was the rarest of rare crime or not,” the probe official told HT.

The three killers are also on trial for robbing and killing two other persons, TV journalist Soumya Vishwananthan and a cab driver, within a six month period spanning between 2008 and 2009.

Responding to the verdict, the then south Delhi DCP, HGS Dhaliwal, who had led the probe in the case, also said, “The lower court as well as the high court has upheld the convictions, showing we were accurate in our probe. They have only differed in seeing it as a rarest of the rare case.”