• Home

Indrani Mukerjea, driver sent to judicial custody

Mumbai: Indrani Mukerjea and her former driver Shyam Rai were remanded to judicial custody for 14 days by a magistrate's court here on Monday, while the third accused in the Sheena Bora murder case was taken to Kolkata by the police for further investigations.
The police custody of the three persons, accused of murdering Sheena, Indrani's daughter, got over on Monday. They were produced before the Bandra magistrate, who remanded Indrani and Shyam to judicial custody for 14 days. Indrani was sent to the Byculla jail.
Meanwhile, police sources claimed that forensic analysis of the DNA samples from the human remains at the Raigad forest match those of Indrani, establishing that the body was that of Sheena. Indrani has all along been maintaining that her daughter is in the US.
The police have been seeking further custody over Indrani, claiming that she has not been cooperating and has been "a hard nut to crack." On Sunday, the police had taken Indrani to her Worli home, where her husband Peter, the former CEO of Star India TV, was also present.
Indrani, her former husband Sanjeev and Shyam are alleged to have killed Sheena after picking her up from Bandra on the evening of April 24, 2012. They later allegedly took her body to Indrani's Worli home, packed it in a suitcase and kept it inside the car, which was parked in her garage.
The next day, all three took the body about 100 km south of Mumbai, where it was burnt and dumped in a forest. While the matching of DNA samples is a major relief for the police, who have been struggling to make sense of the murder mystery, the authorities have still to establish the motive behind the murder.
Sheena is Indrani's daughter from her relationship with one Siddarth Das, a live-in partner of hers in the late 1980s, She later married Sanjeev Khanna, with whom she had a daughter, Viddhi, who was adopted by her present husband, Peter.
But after Sheena came to Mumbai - where Indrani told everyone including Peter that she was her younger sister - she fell in love with Rahul, Peter's son from an earlier marriage. Indrani was opposed to the relationship. After allegedly murdering Sheena, she told Rahul that Sheena had gone to the US and had broken off her ties with him.
nithin@khaleejtimes.com

• India