It was the most sensational murder case of the year and after a series of embarrassing bungles, Indian police were under pressure to get results.
So they turned to a practice long since banned in most democracies, but on the rise in India: they injected their prime suspects with a “truth serum”.
India has been transfixed by the murder of Aarushi Talwar, 14, who was found with her throat slit in May at her home near Delhi. Police initially blamed the Talwars' domestic help, but were forced to rethink when his body was found on the terrace of the family house the next day.
Then they detained Rajesh Talwar, the dead girl's dentist father, and drugged him with sodium pentothal — the “truth serum”. The Central Bureau of Investigation, India's equivalent of the FBI, took over and declared him innocent last week.
The CBI now says that the culprit was Krishna, an assistant in Dr Talwar's clinic, who was subjected to six hours of “narcoanalysis” at the Forensic Science Laboratory (FSL) in Bangalore. A suspected accomplice is now receiving the same treatment.
The Aarushi case has exposed the incompetence of Indian police and aroused fears among middle-class Indians that they can no longer trust their increasingly disgruntled domestic staff. But it has also stoked a national debate about the police's use of narcoanalysis, polygraphs and brain mapping — often in the absence of proper forensic investigation.
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