The police custody of the former Haryana Minister, Gopal Goyal Kanda, suspected of instigating Geetika Sharma to commit suicide, was extended by three more days by a court here on Saturday.
The court found merit in the Delhi police prayer that Mr. Kanda’s custody was required to recover three mobile phones that he purportedly used and a mobile phone that Geetika allegedly used before returning it to the MDLR Group when she quit.
Additional Public Prosecutor Rajiv Mohan said the conduct of the suspect could be discerned by Mr. Kanda’s “evasiveness” in answering questions posed to him by the police regarding the mobile phones and a hard disc that was found missing.
Mr. Mohan claimed that the police were constrained by the inability of telecom companies to provide more than a year’s call data record from the mobile phones, which did not contain text of SMS messages.
Case chronology
"Our case is that we are building a sequence of events from 2006, when she joined MDLR Airlines, to August 5, 2012, when she committed suicide as a result of instigation by the accused. The case is dependent on circumstantial evidence. We have the suicide notes and statements of the victim’s family…Two aspects — three mobile phones used by Mr. Kanda in the recent past and the hard disc have to be recovered,” Mr. Mohan said.
The prosecutor also read out in court the contents of an email sent from MDLR Airlines to Emirates Airlines from the id, cmd@mdlrairlines.in, stating that Geetika had not taken proper clearance before leaving MDLR and had forged documents of the company to get a job at Emirates. The email claimed that a complaint was lodged with the Gurgaon Police accusing Geetika of cheating and forgery.
Mr. Mohan read out a fake email sent to Geetika exhorting her to come back to India as the UAE authorities had purportedly issued an extradition warrant against her and set the police on her trail for alleged financial malfeasance.
The prosecution alleged that a financial transaction was made in Geetika’s name by Mr. Kanda when she was not working for his company. One related to purchase of Sundale Education Society and the deposit was made into a bank account of Geetika that had ceased to exist.
Rebutting the prosecution statements, Mr. Kanda’s counsel Ramesh Gupta said the case only amounted to stating that his client “desired” Geetika to be with him.
Counsel also asked the court to verify if the case diaries were “paginated and volumed.”
Regarding Mr. Gupta’s allegation that police officials superior to the case’s investigating officer were questioning Mr. Kanda without entering the details in the records, the court ordered that all officers who questioned the suspect should record their presence in the case diaries.
