Mumbai: By a special court, the former media tycoon Peter Mukerjea, has been sent to judicial custody till December 14, 2015. He has been considered as the one of the prime accused in the Sheena Bora murder case
Mukerjea, charged with murder and other offences, has been in custody of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) since the agency arrested him on November 19 from Mumbai.
The prosecution lawyer said that as of now, they did not require Mukerjea further in CBI custody and sought judicial custody for him.
Mukerjea was on Tuesday presented before the magistrate court for the fifth time by the CBI since his arrest.
Stating that there were no fresh grounds for his further custodial interrogation, the CBI sought judicial custody of Mukerjea, who underwent a polygraph test in New Delhi on November 28.
The CBI remand applications have so far referred to various financial transactions, foreign bank accounts and giving misleading statements on various aspects of the case, and that Peter was aware of the killing of Sheena, the daughter of Indrani through an earlier relationship.
Besides Mukerjea, the other three prime accused in the case — his wife Indrani Mukerjea, her ex-husband Sanjeev Khanna and her former driver Shyamvar Rai — are also in judicial custody till December 3.
The CBI has already filed an approximately 1,000-page chargesheet against Indrani, Khanna and Rai, who were arrested from Mumbai and Kolkata in August.
Sheena Bora, Indrani’s 24-year-old daughter from her earlier partner Siddhartha Das, was allegedly strangulated in a car on the night of April 24, 2012.
Her body was taken to the forests near Gagode village in Raigad district, around 80 km south of Mumbai.
According to the investigation, Indrani also planned to eliminate her son Mikhail with a spiked drink but he managed to escape alive that night.
The trio is accused of pouring petrol over Sheena’s body and setting it afire before dumping the half-burnt remains in the thick bushes from where it was found on May 23, by a local villager.
Nearly three years after the killing, forensic and other tests confirmed that the remnants found in the forests were indeed of Sheena.