Kanda evades reply to 7 key questions

Former Haryana minister Gopal Goyal Kanda, accused of abetting the suicide of Geetika Sharma, was proving to be a hard nut to crack as investigators zeroed in on "seven questions" to prove his guilt, police said yesterday.

"Kanda is still misleading the interrogators as we are in need of some crucial evidence to prove him guilty of abetting Geetika's suicide. We are working on more than seven points," said an officer, who did not want to reveal his identity.

Crash landing: Geetika worked as a flight attendant in MDLR Airlines owned by Kanda. After the airline ceased to function in 2009, she was given a job in another company owned by him. Kanda was on the run since August 8 after Geetika committed suicide on the night of August 4-5 at her house in New Delhi. File pics

Kanda, former flight attendant Geetika's employer and the owner of the now-defunct MDLR Airlines, has been undergoing interrogation since his arrest on early Saturday but has refused to admit anything more than the fact that Geetika was his employee, sources said.u00a0Not only was Kanda trying to mislead police, but he had remained stubbornly quiet on his whereabouts in the last 10 days since Geetika's suicide note blamed him and his employee Aruna Chaddha, now under judicial custody, they said.

u00a0Kanda

Police also failed to get a reply from him about the phone numbers he used for communicating with Geetika. The investigators were also trying to ascertain the nature of some official documents which Geetika was supposed to sign. They documents could reveal the role that Kanda allegedly played in pushing Geetika to suicide.

"Geetika's mother Anuradha alleged that she had called up Kanda on August 4 but he did not answer. When he later called her from another number, she enquired from him about a previous call made by Chaddha, asking about the papers which Geetika was supposed to sign," said the officer.

"To this, Kanda allegedly asked Anuradha to send her daughter to his office to sign those papers," said the officer. Several questions, pointed out the investigators, remained unanswered. For one thing, if Geetika was simply his employee, the police can't figure out why more than 400 SMSes were exchanged between them?

Besides, where were the three computers used by Kanda, Chaddha and Sharma, asked an investigator. Why did Chaddha help the victim in her abortion? Why did she write a forged letter purportedly in the name of Gurgaon station house officer to a Dubai-based airlines where Geetika had joined after the MDLR Airlines stopped operations?

"Geetika's brother Ankit alleged that Kanda had visited his residence and admitted to having sent a ‘forged letter'. The letter alleged that she had an outstanding loan in India," said an investigator. "He apologised to my mother and then took my family for a trip to Shirdi," said Ankit. The family alleged that it was because of the letter that Geetika had to quit her job in Dubai and come back to India.