The Uttarakhand Mahila Manch, a social organ - isation, has decided to move the Supreme Court seeking a CBI probe into the murder of a receptionist allegedly by a resort owner who is the son of a now-suspended BJP leader.

“We have conducted independent probes and found several facts that suggest that the Uttarakhand government and the police were not honest in exposing the criminals and ensuring that they were punished for the kind of brutality they showed,” said Nirmala Bisht, convener of the Manch.

“We had set up several teams of women members of the Manch from Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, Him - achal Pradesh, Rajasthan and Karnataka. They separately conducted inquiries between October 27 and 29 and concluded that the government and the police were trying to save the VIP for whom the girl was killed,” Bisht told reporters in Dehradun.

The 19-year-old receptionist was killed allegedly after she refused to offer sexual favours to a VIP guest.

Bisht said the teams visited the village of the victim in Pauri Garhwal district and the locations in Yamkeshwar and Rishikesh associated with the crime and interviewed a large number of people, including those who were organising a dharna demanding justice for the victim.

Bisht said: “The police were not willing to register a missing report from Septem - ber 18 to September 22. Vinod Arya (father of resort owner Pulkit Arya) is directly related to the political dispensation and this was the reason the administration was trying to save him and his son right from the beginning. The post-mortem report does not mention whether the victim was sexually assaulted. The police didn’t investigate which VIP was supposed to come to the resort. A CBI probe is the only option to know the truth and we are planning to move the Supreme Court.”

The Manch has claimed that the special investigation team of the state government was working under political pressure.

The receptionist had told one of her friends on WhatsApp a day before the September 18 murder that Pulkit wanted her to offer sexual favours to a VIP.

In December 2022, the high court rejected a plea to hand over the case to the CBI and asked the father of the receptionist to submit a detailed reply on why the family thought the SIT was not doing its job properly.

The father told reporters in Pauri Garh - wal on Wednesday that he had told the court what the Manch was saying now but the case was still not handed over to the central agency.