Abhishek Mishra and Ragini, the daughter of Lalu Prasad, at Dasham Falls hours before the tragedy on Friday. The picture was clicked by one of their friends and transferred to Abhishek’s laptop, which is now in police custody. The police made a copy of the hard disk and gave it to Abhishek’s father, S.C. Mishra.

Ranchi, Dec. 12: The father of the engineering student who died in a waterfall has sought a CBI probe but said he was not blaming railway minister Lalu Prasad’s daughter Ragini, who was part of the picnic.

“I am not blaming anyone, let alone Ragini; she is like my own daughter and wanted to marry Abhishek,” said Subhash Chandra Mishra, the father of Abhishek.

The boy, who was a final-year student at the Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra, died on Friday at the Dasham waterfall, around 40 km from Ranchi.

“But I want an investigation by the CBI because we want to find out who is behind my son’s death,” the distraught father said over the phone from Gurgaon.

Mishra’s suspicion of foul play, voiced over the last few days, was followed up today by a letter he addressed to Jharkhand chief justice M. Karpagavinayagam, the Chief Justice of India and the National Human Rights Commission.

Mishra, the chief medical officer at Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital in Delhi, wants a CBI probe to get to the bottom of the incident. Abhishek, his only son, and three other friends, Bharat Anand, Vishal Pandey and Ragini Yadav, had gone to the waterfall on a picnic.

Mishra cited several factors for suspecting foul play. The manner in which the three surviving friends, Ragini, Bharat and Vishal, reached Jharkhand chief minister Madhu Koda’s residence after the accident and disappeared thereafter, he said, was suspicious.

Second, he has misgivings about the credentials of Bharat, especially following a report that he was involved in an equally bizarre incident in 2002.

The student of Birla Institute of Technology was driving back from Giridih with a friend on a motorcycle. By Bharat’s own admission, they stopped to have food and, thereafter, his friend drove away with the motorcycle, leaving him behind at the dhaba.

When the friend failed to return after a long time, Bharat claimed to have gone in search of him and found him lying on the road. Last week, too, Mishra said, Bharat claims to have waited for Abhishek, who disappeared. He wondered if this was just a coincidence.

The body of Abhishek, he pointed out, bore several injury marks but the post-mortem did not address them. The autopsy was over within 15 minutes and the doctor informed the media that the death was by drowning.

The body, Mishra said, had remained under water for 22 hours but was not swollen. Besides, there seemed to be little intake of water.

Discrepancies in the versions being furnished by Bharat and Vishal, he said, had also forced the family to suspect foul play.

Both Bharat and Vishal, however, have been claiming that it was a tragic accident. They were taken to the chief minister’s residence because they were in a state of shock and because Lalu Prasad had presumably called up Koda and sought his help.

Neither Lalu Prasad nor any member of his family was available for comment.

The police, however, insisted that the death was caused by drowning.

Senior superintendent of police Naresh Prasad Singh iterated that the post-mortem report did not leave any room for doubt.