Court allows Talwars to summon seven witnesses

Partially accepting a plea by dentist couple Rajesh and Nupur Talwar, a special CBI court on Tuesday allowed to record the statements of seven witnesses out of the list of 13 persons the couple had submitted.

However, the court rejected two other pleas of the dentist couple, in which they sought reports of scientific tests and demanded a number of exhibits to be examined by their DNA expert.

Additional sessions judge Shyam Lal said that the defence witnesses can depose before the court from June 20.

The court rejected the demand of Talwars to summon former Uttar Pradesh ADG (crime and law and order) Arun Kumar as a defence witness. The seven defence witnesses, on which the court agreed, include Dr R K Sharma, former HOD of forensic science at AIIMS; Dr Urmil Sharma, a gynaecologist and emeritus consultant at Indraprastha Apollo Hospital in Delhi; Dr Amulya Chadda, a dentist, and Mahendra Sharma, a carpenter.

CBI judge Shyam Lal also directed the probe agency to produce the golf stick in the court at the time of recording of statements of Dr R K Sharma. Sharma is likely to give his opinion on the golf stick in court on June 20.
CBI investigating officer A G L Kaul had told the court that Rajesh Talwar had brutally hit Aarushi and Hemraj with their golf stick “after finding them in a compromising condition”.

“Our two applications regarding submission of scientific test reports, other documents, and exhibits to be examined by the defence’s DNA expert were rejected. However, the court partially accepted our defence witnesses list, allowing seven out of 13 to record their statements,” said Manoj Sisodia, Talwars’ counsel.

Some names dropped

The judge, however, dropped the names of Arun Kumar, Dr Richa Sexena, S L Vaya, expert at FSL in Gujarat, nodal officer of Airtel, nodal officer of Vodafone; Arun Kumar, UP ADG (crime and law and order), and registrar of the Supreme Court to summon them as defence witnesses.

The court said that Arun Kumar, the then CBI joint director, gave his statements to the media at a stage when the probe was pending, so he could not be summoned as defence witness.