Patna: The Patna high court has disposed of a criminal writ petition linked to the suspicious death of a NEET aspirant, citing the state government’s decision to hand the investigation over to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and refusing to place the probe under judicial monitoring.
A single-judge bench of Justice Arun Kumar Jha passed the order while hearing a petition filed by the student’s father, Naveen Kumar. The court noted that since the investigation had already been transferred to the CBI, the petition no longer survived.
Appearing for the state, government advocate Kinkar Kumar told the court that the handover to the central agency rendered the plea infructuous. The bench agreed and rejected the petitioner’s request that the CBI investigation be monitored by a retired Supreme Court judge or a sitting high court judge.
The court said that when the government itself has entrusted the matter to the CBI, the agency must be allowed to function independently. It observed that the case did not fall under the category of public interest litigation that would warrant continuous judicial supervision of the investigation.
Justice Jha further held that it would be inappropriate to order monitoring in the absence of an investigation report. However, the court clarified that if the petitioner found shortcomings in the CBI’s inquiry, he would be free to approach the high court again at a later stage.
During the hearing, the petitioner alleged that the state’s director general of police and the senior superintendent of police in Patna were threatening him and his family, and pressuring them to accept that his daughter’s death was a suicide. The court did not issue directions on the allegation but asked the petitioner to cooperate fully with the CBI so that the facts of the case could be established.
