New Delhi, Feb 12 (IANS): The Supreme Court on Wednesday turned down a plea filed by Indrani Mukerjea, the prime accused in the murder case of her 25-year-old daughter Sheena Bora, seeking permission to travel abroad.
"The trial is at an advanced stage. You can complete the trial and then go," remarked a bench of Justices M. M. Sundresh and Rajesh Bindal as it directed the trial court to conclude the pending proceedings within a year.
"There is no guarantee that you will come back," added the Justice Sundresh-led bench as it dismissed the plea seeking permission to travel abroad.
In 2022, the Supreme Court granted bail to Indrani, considering her long incarceration of 6.5 years and the unlikelihood of completion of trial shortly.
Indrani, who was an accomplished media executive and socialite, was married to media baron Peter Mukerjea but later divorced by mutual consent while in incarceration.
In 2015, she was arrested for murdering Sheena Bora.
After her arrest, Indrani Mukerjea was sent to judicial custody at Byculla women's prison, Mumbai.
The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) took over the case and filed charges against Indrani under Sections 302 (murder), 201 (causing disappearance of evidence), 34 (criminal conspiracy), 420 (cheating and forgery), 364 (kidnapping) and 120-B (conspiracy) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).
The erstwhile Mukerjea couple, along with their driver Shyamvar P. Rai and Sanjeev Khanna, the second husband of Indrani, were arrested at different points in 2015 after the unbelievably horrifying Sheena Bora murder case was detected and cracked by Mumbai Police.
Just 24 then, Sheena Bora was in a live-in relationship with Rahul Mukerjea - the younger son of Peter Mukerjea from a previous wedding - but it later emerged, that he was the step-brother of the deceased girl.
Incidentally, after Indrani married Peter Mukerjea, she passed off Sheena as her sibling along with sole brother Mikhail Bora, though both were her children from her first marriage with Siddhartha Das of Shillong.
Indrani was reportedly opposed to Sheena's relationship with Rahul Mukerjea and hatched a conspiracy to eliminate her.
Sheena's partially burnt body was dumped in a suitcase and thrown in the thick jungles of Raigad on April 24, 2012. Her unidentified, charred, body remnants were recovered on May 23, 2012, but no ADR or FIR was lodged and only a station diary entry was made at the Pen Police Station, Raigad.
The investigations kick-started over two years later, around May 2015, after Mumbai Police got a tip-off from the driver Rai, who was arrested for possession of illegal arms. After his sustained interrogation, Rai blurted out the gory details of what turned out to be one of the most sensational murder cases and hogged the limelight for months as sordid details tumbled out along with Bora's skeletal remains.
At one point, in December 2021, Indrani made a bizarre claim to the CBI that her daughter was alive and living in Jammu and Kashmir, but there were few takers.