Pune: The Bombay high court rejected the anticipatory bail pleas of three women accused of abetting a 19-year-old first-year BJ Medical College (BJMC) student’s death by suicide on March 9 in their shared rented flat under the jurisdiction of Chandannagar police.The victim was pursuing her BSc (Nursing) course. One of the accused women is a civil services aspirant. The other two are executives in a digital engineering and construction modelling company, and an HR consulting and corporate legal advisory firm.The three, all aged 26 years, moved the high court after a sessions court in Pune rejected their anticipatory bail applications on April 2.The bench of Justice Shivkumar Dige held on July 15, “In the FIR, there are specific allegations against the applicants that they subjected the deceased to mental and physical harassment, as a result of which she committed suicide. When the police broke open the door of the room where the deceased committed suicide, police found a suicide note in her pocket. It shows that the said suicide note was not planted.”The court said, “In the suicide note, it is specifically mentioned that due to continuous mental and physical harassment by the applicants the deceased committed suicide. The investigation is in progress. Considering these facts, custodial interrogation of the applicants is required.”One of the defence advocates later prayed for a stay on the court’s order but the judge cited the public prosecutor’s objection to the grant of grant of such prayer and rejected the plea.Advocate Amol Jagtap, representing the victim’s father and the complainant in the case, said, “The victim had moved into the shared flat a couple of months before the incident after hiring it through an online platform for digital classifieds that lists residential properties for rent.”Jagtap said, “The victim was found hanging from a ceiling fan in her room sometime between 7.30am and 9.30am on March 9. We brought to the court’s notice through the public prosecutor the injury marks mentioned in the postmortem report that indicate she was assaulted prior to the incident.”
