KATHMANDU, Dec 19: Police have formed a seven-member high-level special committee led by Additional Inspector General (AIG) Dipak Thapa to investigate the rape and subsequent murder of Nirmala Panta. The committee also includes Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) Bhupendra Khatri from the Crime Investigation Department (CID) and Superintendent of Police (SP) Hobindra Bogati.
According to SP Bogati, the committee has already started collecting evidence for the investigation. “Since Tuesday, we have started calling the previous investigating officers to the Central Investigation Bureau (CIB) to get suggestions and detailed information about the case since the case took place years ago,” he said.
More than six years have elapsed since ninth-grader Panta, 13, of Bhimdattapanta Municipality-2 of Kanchanpur, who left home to visit her friend Roshani Bam, was found raped and subsequently murdered in a sugarcane field near her home on July 27, 2018, a day after she went missing.
Six years and six different investigation teams later, the case remains on the tip of the tongue of the general public as a heartbreaking unsolved mystery in Nepal’s history, drawing questions to the credibility and ability of the Nepal Police’s investigation procedure.
Nirmala murder case remains a mystery even after five years
The public’s skepticism of the police investigation started when the initial investigation by a team local police personnel firstly refused to search for Panta after her parents reported her missing, then tarnished the crime scene by washing the victims’ trousers while being recorded on video which went on to garner public outrage as it went viral on social media.
The public skepticism developed into outright distrust as a team of police officials from the CIB led by Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP) Angur GC preemptively claimed that Dilip Bista, a local, was the culprit based on ‘confession’, only to be proven otherwise by a DNA sample from the local that did not match with the samples from the victim. Later reports from the National Human Rights commission questioned the credibility of the DNA sample collected from the victim claiming that its male component might be contaminated or not even belong to the culprit.
Police then rounded up Bam and her sister amid the locals’ suspicion that the sisters were involved in the crime, only to release them due to lack of evidence. It was later found that Khem Bhandari, publisher and editor of a local news newspaper, who had swayed the public’s suspicion away from Bista to the Bam sisters, is a relative of Bista.
The police investigation into the case was so shambolic that the government had to form a probe committee led by the then Director General of Department of Prison Management Hari Prasad Mainali which went on to recommend the transfer of the chief of District Police Office, Kanchanpur, SP Dilli Raj Bista and the Chief District Officer Kumar Bahadur Khadka. In addition, five investigating officers including DSP GC were suspended.
In January 2019, Panta’s mother Durga Devi filed an FIR against eight investigating officers for destruction of evidence. Six of them were detained immediately and brought to court while SP Bista and DSP GC only surrendered themselves at the district court after the six officers were granted release on bail.
With multiple levels of police negligence in the case, the rape and murder case has become a dark stain in the Nepal Police’s history of investigation. SP Bogati told Republica that the freshly initiated investigation committee will first study the lapses in previous police investigations by interrogating the investigating officers and attempt to correct them in order to succeed in nabbing the perpetrators.
“This investigation is about understanding the lapses of the previous investigations and correcting our mistakes,” he said.
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