CBI files Disha Salian FIR after Bombay High Court ends a six-year gap

The Central Bureau of Investigation registered an FIR in the death of Disha Salian on 13 September, two days after her father, Satish Salian, recorded his statement before the agency. The filing follows a 2 September order of the Bombay High Court, which transferred the case from Mumbai Police and criticised the force for treating a 2020 fall as a closed accidental death for six years.

Salian, 28, a talent manager who had worked with actor Sushant Singh Rajput, died on 8 June 2020 after falling from the 14th floor, reported in some earlier files as the 12th, of a building in Malad. Mumbai Police wrote the death as suicide or accident. Her father has alleged rape and murder and a later effort to fix the paperwork.

PTI, citing CBI officials, said the FIR does not name any person as an accused. That matches the High Court's instruction: record the father's statement, take the police papers, appoint a senior supervising officer, and treat no one as an accused unless the material later supports reasonable suspicion. Advocate Nilesh Ojha, who acts for Satish Salian, told reporters a different story about the same document. He said the FIR lists names that the father wants investigated, among them Aaditya Thackeray, Uddhav Thackeray, Rhea Chakraborty, Showik Chakraborty, Dino Morea, Sooraj Pancholi, Rohan Roy, former Mumbai police commissioner Param Bir Singh, former encounter specialist Sachin Vaze, former Maharashtra home minister Anil Deshmukh, and several officers from the original local inquiry.

Those names are allegations inside a complaint, not findings. The CBI's own earlier inquiry into Rajput's death produced a closure report that treated his death as suicide and did not charge Chakraborty. That report has not been finally heard. The Salian FIR, as described by officials speaking to PTI, invokes Indian Penal Code sections on criminal conspiracy, gang rape, murder, causing disappearance of evidence, public servants framing incorrect records, and related offences. Those sections describe the theory the father wants tested. They do not establish the theory.

NCP (SP) leader Supriya Sule asked on Monday why the same Union government that had treated the matter as closed was now opening it. The political timing is obvious to anyone who follows Maharashtra. Uddhav Thackeray's Shiv Sena (UBT) is in opposition. Aaditya Thackeray is an MLA. The High Court order is the legal trigger, not a party press note. The court said the original handling raised more questions than answers and pointed to gaps in the autopsy timeline and the paper trail.

The agency has already written to Malvani police for the complete file. A senior officer is to supervise. What the CBI must now do, and what the court said it must not do, are different tasks. It must collect forensic and documentary material that still exists six years later. It must not convert a list of public figures into a charge sheet without that material.

Salian's death sat for years in the slipstream of Rajput's death, which followed it by days and produced a national argument about film-industry power, drugs and policing. That argument never produced a criminal conviction. The risk in the new FIR is that the same argument returns as a substitute for work on the Malad building, the medical legal report, and the chain of custody for whatever samples remain.

For the family the change is simpler. A central agency now has a registered case and a court watching the file. For the people named in the father's statement the change is a public allegation without, as of Monday's official briefing, the status of accused. The next document that matters is not another television debate. It is the first CBI progress report the High Court asked for.