The Supreme Court has reserved its order in a plea seeking for a transfer of investigation from the State police to the CBI into the mysterious death of Vikrant Nagaich, a 3rd year student at National Law University, Jodhpur, in August 2017.
A bench comprising of Justices RF Nariman, Navin Sinha and Indira Banerjee heard the matter and proceeded to reserve orders in the same. The bench also pulled up the State of Rajasthan for attempting to close the case by filing a final report.
Earlier, the Apex Court had directed Rajasthan Police to complete the investigation into the death of Nagaich within a period of 2 months. In the hearing before that, it had been observed by the bench that they would first hear the State Police in order to ascertain why no progress had been into investigation over a period of 3 years since Nagaich’s death.
Apparently statements were made to the media, which depicted that the deceased had committed suicide as he was suffering from depression. The plea also contends that the University had been reluctant to inform the parents of the deceased up until a group of friends of the deceased forced them to do so.
The plea further avers that that not only did the State Investigation Agencies fail to register an FIR for a period of 10 months post the incident, it was ultimately only done in a reluctant manner after the untiring efforts of the victim’s parents.
Therefore the plea contends that the obvious lacunae in the investigation into the death of the deceased pinpoints at the Investigation Agency’s reluctance to deviate from their initial conclusion that he deceased had committed suicide.
In the light of the above, the petitioner is seeking for the transfer of the pending investigation from the Crime Investigation Department, Crime Branch- Jaipur to CBI.
