Sometime on the night of May 15, 2008 a teenager and the family’s help were murdered at L-32, Jalvayu Vihar, Sector 25, Noida. The family — a doctor couple named Rajesh and Nupur Talwar — found 14-year-old daughter Arushi dead the following morning. Household help Hemraj’s body was discovered later.

Exactly eight months on, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) finally says it has “finalised the investigations” and is ready to file a chargesheet soon, the investigating agency’s spokesperson, Harsh Bhal, told Newsline on Thursday. “I cannot tell you the exact time when we would file the chargesheet but it will be very soon,” he said.

Sources in the CBI said the chargesheet would be filed next month.

The agency, which took over the probe from Noida police on June 1 last year, could not file a chargesheet all this while due to lack of evidence. With the agency’s crack investigators unable to find the weapon with which the teenager and the help, of Nepalese origin, were killed, and little, if anything, established in court, all three accused were let out on bail last year.

Sources admitted that the investigating agency is yet to come up against any evidence but added that the chargesheet would be filed on the basis of forensic evidence and confessions of the suspects. Officials did not disclose the fresh recoveries that the CBI has apparently made in these months but hinted that there is “substantial material” to file a chargesheet.

The agency is at present taking legal opinion on it. “We don’t want to leave any stone unturned this time,” a source said.

Sources said CBI is equipped with evidence against the same three accused: Krishna, Rajkumar and Vijay Mandal — the former was a compounder at the Talwars’ clinic, Rajkumar a help at family friend Durranis’, and the Mandal an aide at a neighbour’s house. CBI officials said Krishna and Rajkumar were recently called from Nepal as the agency might need to quiz them “anytime” in the last lap of the probe.

Past hurdles and failures
Earlier, the CBI had failed to chargesheet the three accused within the mandatory 90 days, which ended September 10 — CBI director Ashwini Kumar had told Newsline on August 30 that the agency “did not recover any evidence”. Exonerated by CBI, Dr Talwar had by then been released by court.

Later, in the last week of October, a register with medical examination records of Arushi went missing.

Incidentally, CBI is making claims of finishing investigations for the second time: then CBI director Vijay Shankar had in July 2008 said the case was “closed”.