Keeping in mind the ongoing nationwide protests, especially by the doctors, and their concerns, the CBI investigation into the brutal rape-murder case at Kolkata’s RG Kar Hospital and Medical College, turned to be very sensitive.
Moreover, the doctors across the country have expressed their anguish and anger over the incident and taken to the streets demanding justice for the victim. Massive peaceful protests have broken out on the streets of various parts of the country. The CBI, also responding to the nation-wide uproar towards the brutal incident, has handed over the investigation to two of its top women officers.
Those two women officers have experience of handling a few such notorious cases earlier, with considerable success. The overall charge has been shouldered upon Sampat Meena, a 1994 batch IPS officer from Jharkhand, who handled the Hathras rape and murder case as well as the Unnao rape case.
With her is Officer Seema Pahuja, who was also part of the Hathras investigation team. The ground-level investigation will be carried out by Pahuja, who achieved a conviction in what was till then regarded as a blind case of the rape and murder of a Class 10 student in Himachal Pradesh.
The Gudiya case of 2017 triggered a clamour in the hill state then. The teen went missing while returning from school, a path that went through a dense forest track, was where she got abducted. Her body was found two days later. She had been raped and strangled.
In April 2018, the CBI revealed how it cracked the case using advanced DNA technology of percentage and lineage matching. After questioning over 1000 locals, they finally tested the DNA of over 250 people and found a match to forensic samples in the father of the accused. The son, who was out on bail and on the run, was later traced.
He was also found guilty of the death of the girl’s father in judicial custody, for which he is serving a 10-year jail term. What added to the public outrage was that her body was cremated by the Uttar Pradesh Police and the administration allegedly without the consent or the presence of her family.
Three of the four accused in the case have walked free. The fourth, Sandeep Thakur, has been convicted for culpable homicide not amounting to murder, and not of rape or murder.