The Bombay high court on August 3 asked the police what had stopped them from filing an FIR in the death of ex-celebrity manager Disha Salian when her father, whose plea it was hearing, raised suspicion about the circumstances of her 2020 death by falling off a residential building’s 14th floor at Malad in Bombay. It also wondered how the autopsy report did not mention injury. Disha died on June 8, 2020, after which the police registered an Accidental Death Report (ADR). At the time of her demise, she was looking after the business affairs of actor Sushant Singh Rajput who, incidentally, died by suicide a week later.
While the police claim to have conducted an inquiry before arriving at the conclusion that she had committed suicide, her father, Satish Salian, filed a petition in the high court last year, alleging that his daughter was gang-raped and murdered.
A bench of Justices Bharti Dangre and Manjusha Deshpande sought to know from the police during the hearing on August 3 why no FIR had been lodged instead of treating the case as an accidental death inquiry.
The public prosecutor informed the court that inquiries were conducted twice and the inference both the times was that it was a case of suicide. About the injuries, the PP said, there were head injuries to Salian’s body, as per the photographs. Satish Salian’s advocate informed the court that the initial photographs shown to the father by the police indicated no such injuries and that “the police then fabricated these photos showing head injuries”.
The high court also rapped the police for not providing certain case-related documents, including the ADR, to the petitioner.
