PUNE: A court on Friday effectively ruled out the polygraph test of Siya Goyal and Chetan Chaudhary, accused of murdering realtor Ketan Agarwal, and sent them to 14-day judicial custody. Siya and Chetan had declined the examination. The court said the test could not be conducted without their consent. Siya and Chetan declined to undergo the polygraph examination after their lawyers opposed it before Vadgaon Maval court’s judicial magistrate first class A M Vibhute. The court observed that the examination could not be conducted without the duo’s consent. The accused were later shifted to Yerawada central prison.Ketan (25), director of a real estate firm, died after falling from a cliff at Lohagad in Maval taluka on June 18. The case was initially registered as an accidental death but later turned into a murder investigation after the police claimed involvement of Siya and Chetan.Both were arrested on June 23 and remanded in police custody till July 3.Siya allegedly gave a predecided signal to Chetan before Ketan was pushed from the cliff.The Lonavla Rural police informed the court on Friday that they had recovered deleted data from the cellphones of the accused and found evidence of coded communication, prompting investigators to probe the possible involvement of a third person in the alleged conspiracy.The police also told the court that they had recovered a second cellphone allegedly concealed by Siya and could be sent for forensic examination.The investigators submitted in the court that the analysis of the recovered data was still under way. They stressed decoding the alleged coded conversations could help establish if anyone else had assisted the accused, Siya and Chetan, in planning or executing the crime.Assistant police inspector Manoj Pawar, the investigating officer of the case, informed the court that they verified the sequence of events narrated by Chetan and seized the trousers he was allegedly wearing during the offence.The police conducted a panchnama at the spot where Siya allegedly disposed of her passport and seized the clothes she was allegedly wearing at the time of the crime. The police also completed the panchnama of the spot where the accused allegedly rehearsed the murder plan.Assistant public prosecutor Rajshree Virkud argued that substantial progress had been made in the case during the police custody of Siya and Chetan. She submitted that the coded language the duo used during their conversations could reveal the involvement of a third person.Siya’s counsel Vipul Dushing opposed the plea for the extension of the duo’s police custody, arguing that both cellphones had been seized. Dushing said seeking their police custody merely to decipher the coded language was unjustified.He contended that investigators should rely on their own expertise to interpret the recovered communications. Advocate Ram Shahane, appearing for co-accused Chaudhary, argued that the police request for a face-to-face interrogation of the accused was vague.
