When the Jammu and Kashmir High Court finally decides on the state government’s plea to allow it to refer the Shopian case to the CBI, the first task of the investigators is cut out. The probe into the rape and murder of the two victims cannot begin until the investigators ascertain when and how the slides of the vaginal swabs of the victims were replaced, tampered with or fudged during a 27-day chain of events before they arrived at the Central Forensic Laboratory (CFL).

The first stop for the J&K Police’s Special Investigation Team (SIT) is likely to be the Deputy Chief Medical Officer’s locker, where the slides were kept for a night. Also under question is the role of Srinagar’s Forensic Science Laboratory, where the samples were kept in a cardboard box for 25 days. Finally, doubts also linger about what transpired at the police headquarters, where for six days two Inspectors General of Police sat on the forensic report suggesting the presence of spermatozoa on the slides.

The bodies of Neelofar, 22 and her sister-in-law Asiya, 17 were found on May 30. The SIT was set up on June 8 and Superintendent of Police Shahdeen Malik took over the investigation on June 12.

The SIT sent the blood samples of four policemen for DNA profiling to the CFL, New Delhi, on July 22 to check for a match with the DNA profiles of the spermatozoa on the slides of the vaginal swabs of the victims. All this came to naught when it became known that the vaginal swabs did not belong to the victims at all.

... contd.