Sheena Bora murder: Court orders to provide accused with electronic evidence
Since the trial rested on oral, documentary and electronic evidence, copies of the electronic evidence were required to be supplied to the accused
MUMBAI: A special court has ordered its registry to examine the electronic evidence submitted by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in the Sheena Bora murder case and provide digital copies to all the accused in the case.
Special judge Dr JP Darekar passed the order last week on an application filed by Sanjeev Khanna, one of the accused, complaining that though a forensic expert had referred to multiple electronic devices and their contents in his deposition, none of those had been supplied to the accused.
In the plea filed through advocate Harshman Chavan, Khanna pointed out that during the trial, the prosecution had referred to a forensic report while recording the evidence of KV Bagekari, a forensic expert. Defence lawyers had taken objection at the time, saying copies of hard disks and electronic data referred to in Bagekari’s deposition had not been supplied to them. Though the prosecution had promised to clarify the matter, it had not provided copies of the electronic evidence to the accused, Khanna said, and urged the court to order the CBI to provide them with cloned copies or mirror images of a hard disk and two compact discs (CDs) that Bagekari had referred to.
The court noted that during investigation, the central agency had submitted a hard disk containing data extracted from the laptop of a prosecution witness, along with a supplementary charge sheet and two CDs, containing data extracted from the mobile phone of Rahul Mukerjea, a key prosecution witness. The CDs, the court said, were referred to in the report of the forensic science laboratory at Kalina, though there was no mention of the CDs in any of the charge sheets.
The court said that the prosecution had already examined 139 witnesses and the trial was at its fag end. Since the trial rested on oral, documentary and electronic evidence, copies of the electronic evidence were required to be supplied to the accused through their lawyers, in the interest of justice, the court noted.
Accordingly, the special judge directed the court registry to examine the electronic devices submitted by the CBI in a sealed cover, and supply copies thereof to the CBI as well as the accused persons.
According to the prosecution, Sheena Bora was allegedly strangled inside a car on April 24, 2012 by her mother and former media executive Indrani Mukerjea, with the assistance of her ex-husband Sanjeev Khanna and driver Shyamvar Rai. Her body was allegedly destroyed the next day by burning it in a forested area of Pen tehsil in Raigad district.
The murder came to light in 2015 when Rai was arrested for allegedly trying to dispose of an illegal weapon, and during interrogation, revealed details of the murder. Indrani Mukerjea and Sanjeev Khanna were arrested in August 2015, while Peter Mukerjea, a former media mogul and then husband of Indrani, was taken into custody three months later.