One of Talwars' witnesses declines to depose

Two defence witnesses in the Aarushi murder case did not turn up in the special CBI court today to record their statements, while the accused dentist couple asked the court to drop the name of another witness claiming he does not want to depose due to "pressure from CBI."
Rajesh and Nupur Talwar, who are standing trial for the murder of their daughter Aaurshi and domestic help Hemraj, today could not produce their defence witnesses Masuma Jha and Vikas Sethi before court on medical grounds.
The couple also pleaded the court to drop Mahender Sharma as their witness in the case.

On the Talwars' plea, the court agreed to drop the name and asked them to produce their remaining two witnesses before it on July 18.
Talwars said in their application that Mahender Sharma, a carpenter, changed his address and does not want to record his statement "under pressure of CBI officials", so he would be discharged as defence witness in the case.
"We submitted three applications in court today. First application stated that Vikas Sethi is not well, so he is currently not able to record his statement before the court.

"In the second plea, we said that Masuma Jha's husband is in hospital while in third application, we demanded to drop Mahender Sharma as defence witness as he don't want to testify under pressure of CBI officials," said Manoj Sisodia, counsel of Rajesh and Nupur Talwar.

So far, four defence witnesses -Dr RK Sharma, former HOD forensic science at AIIMS, Dr Urmil Sharma, a gynaecologist, Dr Amulya Chadda, a dentist and Rajinder Koul, a resident of Sector 47 in Gurgaon - have recorded their statements before Ghaziabad special CBI court.
After dropping Mahender Sharma as their defence witness, the dentist couple have now six witnesses in the double murder case which took place in the Talwars' Noida house on the intervening night of May 15-16, 2008.