A city court on Saturday extended the police custody of three accused in the Sheena Bora murder case, including former CEO of INX Media Pvt ltd Indrani Mukerjea, till September 7, after the investigators disclosed to the court that since the accused had taken all care to cover their tracks while committing the “premeditated” crime, they were taking longer time than necessary to muster evidence in the case.
In a development that came two days after Mumbai’s former Police Commissioner Julio Riberio sought the intervention of the Chief Justice of Bombay High Court to stop the “media trial” in the sensational crime, Chief Metropolitan Magistrate S. M. Chandgade remanded the three accused — Indrani, her second husband Sanjeev Khanna and driver Shyamvar Rai, in further custody till Monday.
In their remand application, the investigators told the court that notwithstanding the delay arising out of the concealment or destruction of evidence by the accused, the investigations had “picked up pace” and that they needed the extension the custody of the accused by three more days.
Citing as many as 14 reasons for seeking the extension of the police custody of the three accused by two days, the investigators said that they needed time to investigate further the finding that after allegedly eliminating Sheena, that the lady accused (Indrani) had fraudulently created a bogus email id of her deceased daughter and send e-mails to several persons, that they needed to recover the material used for committing the crime and to recover things like mobile that the deceased had her person when she was killed.
The investigators also told the police that they needed time to investigate if more persons other than those under the police custody were involved in the crime, they required to send out letters to the authorities concerned to obtain evidence regarding the communication that Indrani and Sanjeev had using skype, the voice-over IP and instant messaging service and that they wanted to investigate the manner in which Indrani had hatched a conspiracy in Kolkata to eliminate Mikhail Bora (Sheena’s younger brother), her son from her first marriage with Siddharth Das.
Meanwhile, the city police confirmed that a digital facial superimposition of Sheena’s profile had matched with the skull recovered from the off the Khopoli-Pen Road in the neighbouring Raigad district, where the accused had burnt and disposed of Sheena’s body on April 25, 2012.
This apart, a report from the NMC run-BYl Hospital stated that the bones belonged to that of a woman aged between 22 and 25 years and that the murder had place sometime in 2012.