DHANGADHI: All eight police officers, including the then Kanchanpur Superintendent of Police Dilliraj Bista, who were charged with destroying evidence in the Nirmala Panta rape and murder case, have been acquitted by the district court.

Kanchanpur District Court Registrar Yaduraj Sharma confirmed the district court had acquitted all of them.

After Nirmala Panta, a 13-year-old girl of Bhimdatta Municipality, was raped and murdered, police arrested some ‘suspects’ and interrogated them.

However, they were accused of torturing ‘suspects’ and destroying evidence. Nirmala Panta’s mother Durga Devi and kin of a suspect filed first information reports against eight policemen — the then Kanchanpur Police Superintendent of Police Dilliraj Bista, DSP Angur GC, DSP Gyan Bahadur Sethi, Inspector Ekendra Bahadur Khadka, Inspector Jagadish Prasad Bhatta, Sub-inspector Harasingh Dhami, Sub-inspector Ramsingh Dhami and Constable Chandani Saud. They were charged with torturing those arrested and destroying incriminating evidence.

The policemen were arrested, but soon freed on bail.

Nirmala was allegedly raped and murdered while returning home from her friend’s place on July 26 two years ago.

While the victim’s mother accused police of refusing to search for her daughter after she filed a missing person report at the local police station on the evening of July 26, locals accused the police of destroying evidence from the scene of crime, botching up investigation and shielding the perpetrator(s).

Videos, the general public had uploaded on social media, showed police washing the victim’s trousers in muddy water and cleaning blood stains from the girl’s thighs. This sparked protests and the victim’s family refused to accept Nirmala’s body until the real culprit(s) were arrested.

However, Kanchanpur District Police Office allegedly colluded with officials at the District Administration Office to use threats, intimidation and inducements to make the parents of the deceased perform her final rites.

Giving in to police pressure, Nirmala’s father Yagya Raj Panta and mother agreed to perform her final rites on July 30.

Though protests subsided after Nirmala’s final rites were performed, they flared up in Kanchanpur and places across the country after police made public Dilip Singh Bista, a ‘mentally disturbed’ person, as a suspect in the case on August 20.

A 14-year-old lost his life in police firing during one such protest, while another teenager was shot at and badly injured.

As protests continued amidst police failure to track down the actual perpetrator(s), Nirmala’s mother came to Kathmandu on September 12. Thousands of people took to the streets with her seeking justice.

A number of investigation committees have investigated the incident and police have arrested a number of persons and conducted DNA tests, but the murder remains a mystery.

A version of this article appears in e-paper on July 31, 2020, of The Himalayan Times.