The Jharkhand High Court on Tuesday directed the state government to hand over the Abhishek Mishra death case to the Central Bureau of Investigation.
A division bench comprising Chief Justice M K Vinayagam and Pramod Kumar Kohli also asked the government to pass on to the CBI all relevant documents of the state investigating agency, which said that the BIT student had drowned after slipping into the Dassam Falls on December eight, last year.
Mishra was accompanied by three friends, including Ragini, Railway Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav's daughter, when the incident took place.
The court's direction came after its December 21 suo motu cognisance of a letter addressed to it by Abhishek's father Subhas Chandra Mishra, requesting a CBI probe into the matter.
The bench also took note of Chief Minister Madhu Koda's rejection of Opposition demand for a CBI probe following the hurried announcement by the police that Abhishek had drowned.
Abhishek's father, a doctor with the Ram Manohar Lohia hospital in Delhi, protested against the 'urgency' shown by the police in describing the matter as a 'natural death,' just 15 minutes after conducting the post-mortem.
He also claimed that the post-mortem report did not indicate presence of water in the respiratory system and external injuries on his son's body. The police too did not take a second opinion on the report.
