A CBI court on Thursday extended the judicial custody of arrested cops, including Inspectoe General Zahur H Zaidi and former Shimla SP DW Negi till 19 September.
The nine cops who were arrested by the CBI for custodial death of an accused in Kotkhai Police Station, were produced before the court which sent them to judicial custody for 13 days. No lawyer turned for hearing on behalf of the arrested cops as the Shimla district bar association had passed a resolution, to not to defend them.
Zaidi along with seven other cops including the then DSP Theog, Manoj Joshi, SHO Kotkhai Police station were arrested by CBI on 29 August and since then they are behind the wars. While DW Negi was arrested on 16 November and the CBI would soon file a supplementary chargesheet against him in the case.
Gudia, a tenth standard girl from Kotkhai, had gone missing while returning home from school on 4 July. Her body was found in the woods on 6 July with multiple injuries on her body. Her autopsy had confirmed that she was gangraped and strangulated to death.
Following public outrage over ghastly crime, the government had constituted a SIT which had arrested six persons, Ashish Chauhan, Rajender Singh alias Raju, Deepak, Subhash Singh Bisht, Suraj and Lokjan for the ghastly crime on 12 and 13 July. The cops had allegedly tortured five accused, excluding Ashish Chauhan to confess that they were involved in gangrape and murder.
The torture had resulted in the death of Suraj on the intervening night of 18-19 July and investigations had revealed that Suraj was severely thrashed after he had demanded one more chapatti in dinner.
On 19 July, the Himachal Pradesh High Court had directed the CBI to probe into the Gudia case, along with custodial death case and on 29 August, eight members of Special Investigation Team (SIT) were arrested for the custodial death. However, there was no headway in the case pertaining to the murder of the 16-year-old girl and the CBI officials are conducting investigations to solve the case.