Jabalpur: The Madhya Pradesh High Court on Friday intervened in the high-profile death case of 33-year-old model-turned-actor Twisha Sharma, granting a petition filed by her family for a second postmortem examination. Overturning a lower court’s refusal, a single-bench directed the state government to urgently facilitate a specialized team of medical experts from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Delhi, to fly down to Bhopal to conduct the fresh forensic procedure. The high court ordered the immediate preservation of all related forensic data and directed state authorities to handover the first autopsy records and case diaries to the incoming central medical board.
The decisive order follows an intensifying legal battle spearheaded by Twisha’s father, Navnidhi Sharma, and their legal counsel, Ankur Pandey, who challenged a lower court ruling passed on May 20 by Judicial Magistrate First Class Anudita Gupta. The magistrate had previously rejected the family’s application, citing a lack of ultra-low temperature preservation facilities (minus 80 degrees Celsius) in Bhopal necessary to arrest decomposition, while noting that minor procedural infractions should not warrant a re-examination. However, the family moved the high court alleging blatant anomalies in the initial postmortem conducted at AIIMS Bhopal. Their petition highlighted that the local police had completely failed to provide the “ligature material”—the belt allegedly used in the hanging—to the initial autopsying doctors, and pointed out a suspicious discrepancy where Twisha’s modeling profile height of 173 cm was recorded as just 161 cm in the initial medical summary.
Twisha, a resident of Noida and former Miss Pune, was found dead under mysterious circumstances on May 12 at her marital residence in the Katara Hills area of Bhopal, less than six months after her marriage. While her in-laws claimed she suffered from drug dependencies, the initial autopsy findings revealed chilling indicators, detailing “asphyxia due to antemortem hanging” alongside multiple antemortem blunt force injuries scattered across her body. Her family has accused her in-laws of brutal domestic abuse and financial extortion, revealing that Twisha was recently forced to abort a pregnancy and pressured to surrender investments worth Rs 20 lakh. Following nationwide protests and a direct meeting between the victim’s family and Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Mohan Yadav—who has promised to recommend a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) probe—the Bhopal police registered an FIR under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) for dowry death against her husband, advocate Samarth Singh, who remains at large with a Rs 30,000 bounty on his head, and her mother-in-law, Giribala Singh, a retired additional district judge.
