- Thursday, April 25, 2024
The 25-year-old actress was found dead at her Juhu home in Mumbai on June 3, 2013.
By: Mohnish Singh
Days after actor Sooraj Pancholi was acquitted of abatement charges in Jiah Khan’s death case by a special Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) court in Mumbai, Jiah’s mother Rabia Khan reacted to the decision, describing the entire trial as a “mockery of the judiciary system.”
Rabia Khan in a statement said, “This case was on the wrong track from the very beginning all the evidence were pointing to homicidal death. Sooraj Pancholi was accused of the wrong crime to start with. How can it be possible that police accused him of the crime when they had no evidence? All the evidence that I had given to CBI like forensic experts’ reports that pointed to murder was simply ignored and was never produced before the honourable court by the prosecution.”
She added, “The entire trial was a mockery of the judiciary system. The court was following a higher court order, pre-trial, the path they predetermined for the trial court to follow to give an acquittal to the accused only to close the case. In long ten years both the agencies of India- the police and CBI did not find one single piece of legally relevant evidence for suicide, it requires convincing evidence of an accused having directly driven the victim to commit suicide immediately before the act and prove any abetment of suicide allegations against the accused Sooraj Pancholi. The burden of proof was so high, all the parties involved must have known the outcome but none of it made legally or rationally any sense.”
The statement also stated, “During the trial, it was soon obvious to me that CBI and the prosecution had been compromised, because they never established the actual cause of death. Let me repeat this: The actual cause of Jiah’s death was never established. No evidence were sent for forensic analysis by the court, Instead, the CBI simply used the preliminary finding of the police-appointed post-mortem report as the cause of death “due to asphyxia.”
Rabia said that Sooraj “lied through his teeth.”
“Sooraj was an accused and he lied through his teeth and both the agencies throughout honoured his lies for reasons best known to them. My daughter Jiah who is no more to speak for self was blamed, because that was very convenient for both agencies to blame the dead. Not only as a mother but as a woman I feel disappointed that yet again the system that we expect to protect us and serve us justice has failed us and made a mockery of its own system,” she continued.
Jiah’s mother also called out Sooraj for celebrating the trial win.
She said, “The fact that he handed out sweets outside the courtroom illustrates this and sums up his mercilessness. Sooraj will one day have to grapple with the demons that he walks with. I have made peace with the loss of my daughter and I leave to God to administer justice on whoever murdered my daughter.”
The 25-year-old Nishabd actress was found dead at her Juhu home in Mumbai on June 3, 2013. Police later arrested Sooraj on the basis of a six-page letter, purportedly written by Jiah, and booked him for abetment to suicide.
Sooraj was in an alleged relationship with Jiah.
Rabia alleged that her daughter was murdered. In October 2013, she moved Bombay High Court seeking a CBI probe in the case, alleging that her daughter had been murdered.
On the order of the Bombay High Court, the CBI took over the probe from the Maharashtra Police in July 2014. Rabia claimed that her daughter was in an abusive relationship with Sooraj, the son of actors Aditya Pancholi and Zarina Wahab.
However, on April 28, Sooraj was finally cleared of all the charges by the CBI court in Mumbai.
