'Unlucky 13' becomes lucky for CBI in Mattoo case

NEW DELHI: For CBI, the number 13 proved lucky in nailing Santosh Kumar Singh who was handed over capital punishment by Delhi High Court for raping and murdering Priyadarshani Mattoo.

CBI Director Vijay Shanker said the investigating agency relied on 13 counts to pin down Singh while preparing the arguments before the High Court.

The CBI did make an attempt to get past the superstition associated with the number by citing more reasons to convict Singh but failed.

"We could not find more circumstances to avoid the number 13 but could not and we had to rely on this number only," said a relaxed senior CBI official after hearing the quantum of sentence for Singh.

The judgement of Justice R S Sodhi and P K Bhasin referred to the 13 reasons on which the prosecution relied to convict Singh. "This case is sought to be established against the accused only on circumstantial evidence and the 13 circumstances relied upon by the prosecution...."

Among the CBI's 13 arguments against Singh were that he had been continuously harrassing her, gave undertakings on more than one occasion not to harass her, the motive of the accused was to have the deceased or to break her, on the day of murder the accused was seen in the law faculty of Delhi University around the murder time and he was spotted near her house.