For six years, Disha Salian’s death sat closed in official records as a suicide. On September 13, the CBI reopened it as something else entirely, registering an FIR that invokes murder, gang rape, criminal conspiracy and the destruction of evidence, a case that has moved from a settled police file to an active criminal investigation almost overnight.
The FIR followed a Bombay High Court order directing the CBI to investigate Salian’s death and record a statement from her father, Satish Salian. The agency has named no one as an accused at this stage. Several individuals appear in the complaint or FIR material as people whose roles will be examined, but appearing in that material does not establish involvement in any offence, and the CBI has said additional names could be added only if evidence actually surfaces to support it.
Salian, 28, died in the early hours of June 9, 2020, after falling from a high-rise building in Mumbai’s Malad area, hours after being with her fiancé and friends. Mumbai Police initially filed an Accidental Death Report rather than an FIR, later concluding she had died by suicide.
A subsequent Special Investigation Team examined the same allegations and found no evidence to pursue further, with an officer involved in that inquiry stating the case had been investigated from every angle and closed for lack of supporting evidence.
The Bombay High Court disagreed with how thoroughly those earlier conclusions actually held up. It found the original investigation raised “more questions than it answers,” citing what it called “many glaring discrepancies” in how the case was handled, while explicitly directing that no individual be treated as an accused absent sufficient material from the CBI’s investigation.
Several of those discrepancies concern the basic mechanics of how the scene was processed. The formal spot panchnama, the documented record of the crime scene, was prepared roughly nine hours after Salian’s death, despite indications that police were already present at the building well before then, leaving the High Court to question what officers knew and why documentation was delayed so long. The Accidental Death Report itself was registered around 3:07 am, apparently drawing on statements from Salian’s parents, yet her father reportedly didn’t reach the hospital until around 4 am, nearly an hour after his position had already been recorded.
The forensic trail carries its own unresolved gap. Post-mortem documentation referenced swab samples, while the material that reached the forensic laboratory reportedly consisted of slide smears instead, a discrepancy doctors attributed to clerical error but one the High Court flagged as a “glaring feature” of the case. That mismatch doesn’t prove tampering on its own. What it does mean is that the CBI now has to reconstruct the entire chain of custody: what was actually collected at the scene, who sealed it, who transported it, and what ultimately reached the lab, a reconstruction that carries far more weight now that the FIR formally includes allegations of gang rape and murder.
A swab’s presence doesn’t prove sexual assault occurred, and the swab-versus-smear discrepancy doesn’t prove rape took place, but both now sit inside a forensic trail investigators have to rebuild from scratch.
Salian’s phone and laptop weren’t seized until June 17, eight days after her death, a gap the High Court questioned given how directly such devices could speak to her final hours and communications. The court also pointed to physical inconsistencies at the scene: the absence of blood-stained soil despite accounts describing blood, injuries recorded during the post-mortem, and no documented damage to a bedroom door that a witness had reportedly said was forced open. No single one of these points proves murder. Taken together, they explain precisely why the High Court refused to let the original inquiry stand as the final word.
The reopened investigation has also surfaced a question that never sat at the centre of the public narrative in 2020: who was the unidentified woman present that night? A police constable’s statement from June 15, 2020 reportedly recorded a hospital doctor’s account that Salian had arrived at Shatabdi Hospital accompanied by two men and a woman. The two men have since been identified in other accounts as her friends, Himanshu Shikhare and Indraneel Vaidya. The woman, however, does not appear in the statements given by Salian’s fiancé Rohan Rai or others who identified the two men, according to current reporting. The difference alone doesn’t implicate anyone in a crime. It establishes something narrower and more concrete: the existing accounts of who brought Salian to hospital don’t line up, and the CBI now intends to resolve that discrepancy, including examining whether hospital CCTV footage from the entrance, parking area or emergency ward can identify her.
Senior CBI officer Seema Pahuja, who has previously worked the Hathras and RG Kar investigations, has reportedly been assigned to supervise the case, examining original police statements, forensic and autopsy material, witness accounts and technical evidence tied to the scene.
The FIR material also names several individuals whose roles are to be examined, including Aaditya Thackeray, Dino Morea, Sooraj Pancholi and Rhea Chakraborty, none of whom are currently named as accused. Aaditya Thackeray has denied any connection to the case, and Uddhav Thackeray has rejected the allegations against his family outright, warning of legal action if what he described as a character-assassination campaign continues. Salian’s father has since escalated his own demands, seeking on September 19 the immediate arrest of Aaditya Thackeray, former Mumbai police commissioner Param Bir Singh, and Sachin Waze, alongside a formal CBI probe into rape, murder and an alleged cover-up. These remain the complainant’s demands, not findings by the investigating agency.
The case’s timeline also intersects with one of the most speculated-about coincidences in recent Indian criminal history. Salian died on June 9, 2020. Actor Sushant Singh Rajput, whom Salian had worked for as a manager, died five days later, on June 14. The proximity fuelled years of public speculation linking the two deaths, a connection Mumbai Police rejected during its original investigation, and one the CBI’s separate probe into Rajput’s death also found no material to support at the time. Whether any genuine evidentiary link exists between the two cases is now a question the reopened Salian investigation will have to answer through evidence, not chronology.
None of what’s emerged so far declares Disha Salian’s death a murder. The CBI’s FIR does not establish that she was gang-raped. Everyone named in the complaint or FIR material remains exactly that, named, not accused. What has genuinely changed is the mechanism: these allegations are now being tested inside a formal CBI criminal investigation rather than argued over in public commentary about a police file closed six years ago. The agency has to reconstruct an entire night, who was present, what happened before the fall, who reached the scene and when, who transported Salian to hospital, what the hospital’s CCTV shows, what became of the forensic samples, why electronic evidence sat unsecured for eight days, and whether the original 2020 records accurately reflect what investigators actually knew at the time.
Six years on, the question is no longer simply whether Disha Salian died by suicide. It’s whether the evidence gathered in 2020 can withstand an investigation that, in 2026, is starting from an entirely different premise.
