- Friday, February 21, 2025
By: Shubham Ghosh
A special Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) court in the western Indian city of Mumbai on Friday (28) acquitted actor Sooraj Pancholi, accused of abetting the suicide of Jiah Khan, his then actor-girlfriend in 2013.
Now, Jiah’s mother Rabia Khan has reacted to the verdict asking how her daughter died.
“The charge of abetment to suicide has gone. But how did my child die? This is a case of murder…will approach the high court,” she was quoted as saying.
Rabia, who also has acted in Hindi films, has been fighting the case for a decade and had been refuting the prosecution’s case that her daughter committed suicide. She has alleged that it has been a case of murder.
Following the special court’s verdict, she maintained that her daughter did not commit suicide but was murdered and that the judgment was not surprising. She vowed to continue her battle to seek justice for her late daughter who was 25 at the time of her death.
Rabia has been fighting the case for years and had been refuting the prosecution’s case that this was a case of suicide and claimed that her daughter was killed.
On Friday, judge AS Sayyad of the special CBI court said that the court did not hold Pancholi, son of veteran actors Aditya Pancholi and Zarina Wahab, guilty due to lack of evidence. He was present in the court with his mother at the time of the verdict. He was arrested in the case in June 2013 and released on bail a month later.
Jiah, who appeared in films such as ‘Nishabd’, ‘Ghajini’ and ‘Housefull’ with accomplished actors such as Amitabh Bachchan, Aamir Khan and Akshay Kumar, respectively, was an American citizen who was found dead at her residence in Mumbai’s Juhu area on June 3, 2013.
Police later arrested Pancholi on the basis of a six-page letter, purportedly written by the late actor.
Pancholi told the court earlier this month that he had been booked in a false case and was a victim of false prosecution.
In that statement, he also said he had broken down after hearing about Jiah’s death and said, “I had lost the most important person of my life and the woman whom I truly loved.”
In September last year, the court had said that the late actor’s mother was trying to delay judgement in the case by trying to portray her daughter’s death as murder.
“Repeated insistence of the petitioner (Rabia Khan) to procure a finding from the court that death of the victim (Jiah Khan), in this case, was homicidal and not suicidal is a clear indication of procrastinating the trial,” the court said, as per a PTI report.
Her approach appeared to circumvent the due process of law, the court said.
