NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court has reopened an investigation in a murder case 17 years after four members of a family were killed in separate incidents, and constituted a Special Investigation Team (SIT) to arrest the real accused.
A bench of Justices J Chelameswar and S A Nazeer appointed former CBI special director M L Sharma as head of the SIT and in its order said, “It is evident that the real culprits responsible for the murder of the petitioners’ family have not been subjected to trial. It is clear that the investigating agency showed a lackadaisical approach in proceeding with the investigation.”
In 2001, the bodies of 30-year-old Seema Garg and her children Bhavya, aged four years, and Pratyakshya, eight months old, were found in their house in Pilakhua, then a part of Ghaziabad in Uttar Pradesh.
Seema’s husband Nitin Garg, along with two others, was charged with the murder but was subsequently acquitted. He too was shot dead the next year.
Nitin’s family moved the top court in 2005 and a CBI investigation was directed in October 2013. But the family then sought to take back the case, and the Court accordingly withdrew its order for a CBI probe in September 2014. Nitin’s mother Sunita Devi and brother Ajay Garg later filed a fresh plea in the apex court, explaining that the family had to withdraw the case earlier due to various reasons, including threats to their family.