Former member of the National Commission for Women and MLC Nirmala Venkatesh demanded that the Ayesha Meira rape and murder case be reopened and the Central Bureau of Investigation entrusted with the probe.
Addressing a press conference here on Wednesday, she made some serious allegations against the local police and political leaders, and said Satyam Babu, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in the case, was a “nobody.”
Ms. Venkatesh said she spoke out after the court sentenced Satyam Babu to life and she was doing it again now.
She said five to six youths had used the terrace of the hostel to consume alcohol earlier in the evening.
Demands
“The food, including some non-vegetarian dishes, was cooked in the hostel kitchen to be supplied to them. Later at night, the incident occurred,” Ms. Nirmala alleged. The police and the local leaders knew who the youths were and that the grandson of a former Minister was one among them. A huge amount of money – up to Rs. 2 crore -- was paid to “hush up the case,” Ms. Venkatesh alleged.
“Two of my demands in the case have not been met. The first was that the case should be handed over to the CBI and the second was that a narco analysis test should be performed on the former Minister's grandson,” she said and added that the police did not do it on the plea that there was no evidence.
When asked to name the local leaders who were trying to hush up the case, she replied with a question, “Why didn't Vijayawada MP Lagadapati Rajagopal utter a single word about the case?”
Ms. Venkatesh said the attitude of Mr. Rajagopal towards women was known to all. Former Union Minister, father-in-law, and political mentor of Mr. Rajagopal, P. Upendra, was in tears when he spoke about the injustice done to his daughter, to leaders in Karnataka after a vernacular daily reported about the MP's alleged affairs with photographs.
“How can an elected representative who cannot be fair to women in his own family worry about the injustice being done to women in the State?” she questioned.
