CBI registers FIR in Disha Salian death after six years as an accident file

The Central Bureau of Investigation registered an FIR on Monday in the death of Disha Salian, the former manager of actor Sushant Singh Rajput, after the Bombay High Court ordered the agency to take over a case that Mumbai Police had kept as an accidental death report for six years.

Salian was found dead on 8 June 2020 after a fall from the 12th floor of Regent Galaxy in Malad, Mumbai. Rajput was found dead at his Bandra residence six days later. Police logged Salian's death as an ADR and later filed a closure report. Her father, Satish Salian, went to the High Court and said the local investigation had left the basic record incomplete.

A division bench of Justice Bharti Dangre and Justice Manjusha Deshpande, in the order that led to Monday's FIR, criticised the decision to treat the death as an accident for six years. The judges pointed to what they called glaring discrepancies and said the probe raised more questions than answers. They also noted that copies of the post-mortem report and the ADR had not been given to the family even five years after the death. The court directed the CBI on 2 September to register an FIR and investigate.

Satish Salian recorded a statement before the agency late last week. Speaking to ANI on Friday, he said he had listed names he wanted examined: Aditya Thackeray, Sooraj Pancholi, Dino Morea and bodyguards. They noted everything down, he said. They said they would take action based on what I told them.

Reporting on Monday described the FIR as listing a wider set of people whose roles the agency is to examine. Those named in contemporaneous accounts include Shiv Sena (UBT) leader Aditya Thackeray, Rohan Roy, actors Dino Morea and Sooraj Pancholi, Rhea Chakraborty, Showik Chakraborty, former police officer Sachin Vaze, former Mumbai police commissioner Param Bir Singh, DCP Vishal Thakur, former chief minister Uddhav Thackeray and former home minister Anil Deshmukh, along with officers linked to Malvani Police Station, doctors and staff on the post-mortem, officials at the Kalina forensic laboratory, building security guards, members of a later special team and unidentified persons.

An FIR records alleged offences and the people whose conduct will be investigated. It is not a finding of guilt. The listed names are, on the face of the reporting, people the complainant and the agency say must be examined for principal offences, conspiracy, an alleged false suicide narrative, and alleged suppression or fabrication of records. Those are allegations. They now sit inside a central investigation rather than a closed ADR file.

The political load is obvious. Uddhav Thackeray was chief minister when the death was first recorded. Aditya Thackeray was a minister in that government. Anil Deshmukh was home minister. Param Bir Singh ran the city police. Sachin Vaze was later arrested in a separate case. Rhea Chakraborty was Rajput's partner and was herself investigated after his death. None of that history is proof of a crime in Salian's fall. It is the reason the High Court was asked to move the file out of Mumbai Police.

The CBI now has to reconstruct a 2020 crime scene from papers that the court already said were incomplete. Witnesses are six years older. Phone data, if it still exists, will have to be pulled from operators and from whatever the local file preserved. The post-mortem and the forensic trail are the first documents the family said they were denied. Those will be the first documents the agency has to test.

Monday's FIR does not reopen Rajput's death by itself. The two files have always been linked in public argument because of the dates and the shared professional circle. The legal link, if any, is for the investigators to make or discard. What changed on 14 September is narrower and more concrete: a death that the city police treated as an accident is now a CBI case with named subjects and a court record that already doubts the original paperwork.

The next visible steps are notices, seizures if any, and whether the agency records statements from the people listed in the FIR. Satish Salian told ANI the officers said proceedings would begin in a few days. That clock started on Monday.