A damp sea breeze drifted over Jankalyan Nagar in Malad West, carrying the quiet of a city locked inside its homes under strict pandemic curfew. On the fourteenth floor of the Regent Galaxy residential tower, the lights inside Flat 1402 remained ablaze past 2:00 a.m. on June 8, 2020. Moments later, that quiet was broken. A heavy impact echoed across the paved inner courtyard of the residential complex as Disha Salian struck the ground.

The 28-year-old celebrity talent manager—who had briefly represented late actor Sushant Singh Rajput—sustained fatal fractures to her skull and jaw.

When patrol officers from the Malvani Police Station arrived, flashing red beacons illuminated the scene, beginning a complex criminal controversy. By dawn, the precinct had registered the incident as an Accidental Death Report (ADR) under Section 174 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC), treating the fall as a suspected suicide or fatal misstep. Six days later, on June 14, Sushant Singh Rajput was found dead in his Bandra apartment. For six years, the initial police determination endured amidst intense public speculation. That narrative fractured when the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) registered a formal First Information Report (FIR), opening an inquiry into an alleged conspiracy that spans prominent political dynasties, screen actors, senior police leadership, and forensic specialists.

The Paper Fortress: Dismantling the Six-Year Section 174 Inquiry

The legal turning point took shape inside the Bombay High Court, where a division bench comprising Justice Sarang V. Kotwal and Justice Ranjitsinha Raja Bhonsale challenged the state’s procedural history. The bench directed scrutiny toward why an unnatural death of this profile had been held in the limbo of an administrative inquiry for six years without a substantive First Information Report ever being registered.

The High Court observed that a Section 174 inquiry is designed solely to establish the apparent physical cause of death and cannot substitute for a full criminal investigation governed by Section 154 of the CrPC. The bench noted that an administrative inquiry carries no statutory authority to provide legal absolutions. Pointing to what it termed "glaring discrepancies" in the initial work—such as the unrecorded timing of the spot panchnama, missing perimeter CCTV footage, and the fact that Salian’s parents were denied copies of the post-mortem report for years—the court ruled that the inquiry raised far more questions than it answered.

Applying the Supreme Court's mandate in Lalita Kumari v. Government of Uttar Pradesh, which dictates the compulsory registration of an FIR upon the disclosure of a cognizable offense, the court directed the CBI to step in. The judges emphasized that registering the FIR did not establish guilt or automatically designate the named individuals as accused. Instead, formal charges would require independent evidence demonstrating reasonable suspicion.

Inside the Central FIR: The Named Network and Evidentiary Allegations

The CBI FIR outlines an alleged network of institutional complicity. The document moves beyond treating the incident as a localized domestic accident, directing investigators to examine principal offenses, criminal conspiracy, and what the agency terms the "subsequent creation and propagation of the false suicide story".

The central document alleges that the machinery of the state was redirected toward shielding suspects through the fabrication and destruction of public records. The scope of the inquiry covers everyone from senior figures in the state cabinet down to the private security guards posted at the entrance gates of Regent Galaxy on the night of the fall.

The Four-Hour Deposition: Satish Salian’s Forensic Allegations

Inside the CBI's regional headquarters in Mumbai, the operational investigation began when Satish Salian sat across from Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP) Puran Kumar. Accompanied by his advocate Nilesh Ojha, Salian underwent a deposition that spanned more than four hours, setting out the factual foundation of his petition.

Salian's formal deposition centered on concrete forensic and digital anomalies. Chief among these was the chain of custody surrounding his daughter's mobile handset. Police records state that the phone was seized as physical evidence at 9:40 a.m. on June 9, 2020. However, records highlighted in the FIR show that the device remained active, transmitting network packets and routing cellular data days after its documented seizure. While local authorities later claimed the device had been reactivated to probe possible links to Sushant Singh Rajput's death, the FIR asserts this explanation contradicts property register logs. The complaint alleges the device was retained and accessed by unauthorized figures—specifically naming Sachin Vaze and Aaditya Thackeray—to identify contacts and locate individuals who had spoken to Salian during her final hours.

The deposition also challenged the anatomical and forensic timeline. Satish Salian submitted that the autopsy was delayed by approximately 50 hours without administrative justification. His counsel argued before the court that this prolonged window compromised the collection of biological evidence.

Questions were raised over contradictions within the hospital documentation:

• An initial panchnama recorded that the body was unclothed when examined.

• Public prosecutors introduced hospital photographs showing the deceased fully dressed, prompting the High Court to demand explanations for why the records conflicted and why no statement had been recorded from the attending physician who conducted the intake.

• Call Detail Records (CDRs) and tower location pings for individuals present inside the apartment had never been preserved in the original case diary.

• Perimeter closed-circuit television recordings from Regent Galaxy and adjacent streets mysteriously vanished from police storage.

Following the session, Satish Salian stated that he had provided investigators with every name and detail in his possession, expressing confidence that formal proceedings would follow the truth.

The Defense and the Political Cross-Currents

The entry of the CBI transformed a disputed municipal investigation into a major political and legal showdown. In hearings before the Bombay High Court, the defense launched an aggressive counter-offensive against the petition's credibility.

Senior Advocate Sudeep Pasbola, representing Aaditya Thackeray, argued that the case was driven by political vendetta rather than genuine forensic discovery. Pasbola asserted that the litigation relied on unverified digital rumors and media hearsay championed by political opponents, pointing directly to statements made by Bharatiya Janata Party leaders Narayan Rane and Nitesh Rane. The defense maintained that Satish Salian had been used as an instrument by rival political factions seeking to damage the Thackeray family's standing.

Thackeray’s counsel emphasized that in June 2020, Satish Salian had submitted formal written statements to the Mumbai Police affirming he suspected no foul play, harbored no criminal accusations, and was satisfied with the accidental fall inquiry. The defense argued that reversing this position years later undermined the legal foundation of the complaint.

Chief Public Prosecutor Shishir Hiray, appearing for the State of Maharashtra, defended the Special Investigation Team’s (SIT) findings. The state maintained that forensic reconstructions, electronic location coordinates, and the corroborated eyewitness account of Rohan Roy demonstrated that Salian died from an accidental fall or suicide without external physical intervention. To counter claims of physical assault, prosecutors produced post-mortem imagery showing the body fully clothed and asserted that the severe craniocerebral damage was fully consistent with a 14-story fall onto masonry.

The Forensic Trajectory: Digital Footprints, Autopsy Re-examinations, and the Legal Horizon

With the case transferred to DSP Puran Kumar, the CBI's probe shifts the dispute from political rhetoric to forensic verification. The agency faces the task of auditing six-year-old evidence trails and examining documentation that has passed through multiple administrative hands.

The agency’s operational mandate centers on four distinct lines of inquiry:

• Digital and Telecommunication Extraction: Independent cell-tower ping triangulation, handset extraction, and IP traffic analysis of Salian’s mobile phone between June 8 and June 15, 2020, to reconcile discrepancies between station register logs and actual device activity.

• Medical Board Review: Re-examination by central forensic pathologists of original post-mortem files, tissue slides, histopathology logs, and injury mappings compiled by Dr. Sanjay Jadhav and the Kalina Forensic Science Laboratory.

• Station Diary and Panchnama Verification: Forensic audits of the general diary registers, property seizure memos, and case papers at Malvani Police Station to verify whether records were altered or suppressed.

• Perimeter and Access Verification: Examination of surviving digital records, visitor registries, and statements from building security guards Sushil Kumar Yadav and Shivmurad Gautam to reconstruct physical access to the fourteenth floor on the night of the incident.

The Bombay High Court’s ruling establishes a clear judicial standard: if verifiable exhibits substantiate a cognizable offense, the CBI must file a formal chargesheet; if the claims dissolve into hearsay, the agency is required to file closure proceedings before the jurisdictional magistrate, reserving the family’s right to submit a protest petition. As central investigators reconstruct the timeline of June 8, 2020, the probe into Disha Salian's death tests the ability of judicial oversight to cut through institutional opacity and uncover the physical truth.