PUNE: The investigators in the Lohagad Fort murder case have decided to seek the polygraph test of the accused Siya Goyal, who, with the help of her boyfriend Chetan Chaudhary, allegedly murdered her fiancé Ketan Agarwal by pushing him off the cliff on June 19.
The investigators are concerned that there are neither direct eyewitnesses to the murder of 25-year-old Pune-based developer Ketan Agarwal nor CCTV footage, and that can create room for the accused and co-accused to turn unscathed in this high-profile case.
Therefore, the police decided to seek the polygraph test even though its reports are not considered direct legal evidence in Indian courts.
“The lie detector test will help to bring more clues and evidence that have so far been concealed by the accused Siya Goyal and co-accused Chetan Chaudhary. The indirect evidence from the lie detector test will help to bring the direct evidence in this case. We need more direct eyewitness and direct digital evidence. We are relying on more circumstantial evidence," said the police officer who is part of the investigation.
"The circumstantial evidence would not help to establish the crime and convince the court to award the harshest punishment to the accused. There is a big challenge for us to prove the crime during the court trial,” the police officer added.
He added that a few months ago, in the ‘Sonam Raghuvanshi Honeymoon Murder’ case in Meghalaya, the accused was granted bail due to technical and legal errors by the police
In the Sonam Raghuvanshi case, the accused got bail because the police did not properly state the reason for the arrest and made a mistake in the sections of the law.
“The court runs on evidence, not on a media trial. Even a small mistake can weaken the entire case,” said a senior police officer.
“We do not want to repeat that in this high-profile case. We are ensuring that the same mistakes do not happen again in this case. Therefore, we are insisting on a polygraph test of the accused Siya, who is expected to reveal undisclosed information about the murder of Ketan Agawal. We are also extracting the digital data (browser history, location, deleted messages). This data will also be strong evidence in court,” police said.
The investigator added that presently, the Lohagad Fort murder case is entirely based on circumstantial evidence.
“As per collected evidence, no one was present at the crime scene except Siya and Chetan, while Ketan has already died. So whatever Siya and Chetan say will be considered a legal statement. Chetan Chaudhary is seen walking around wearing a hoodie in the CCTV, but it does not directly prove the charge of murder. We reconstructed the crime using a dummy Ketan’s body. It has been scientifically proven that there is a difference between a dummy and a real person. Hence, we need to be prepared for several questions during the trial,” the investigator added.