Uttarakhand High Court has rejected the plea of the parents of a murdered resort receptionist to hand over the probe to the CBI and asked them to submit a detailed reply on why they think the state police’s special investigation team is not doing its job properly.

Ashutosh Negi, a resident of Pauri Garhwal district where the receptionist used to work at a resort owned by a now-suspended BJP leader’s son, had filed the petition and the parents of the victim had joined the case by contending that the CBI was the only agency that could investigate the matter.

They had argued that Pulkit Arya, the owner of Vanantara Resort in Pauri Garhwal, and his father Vinod Arya were in a position to influence the SIT, which belongs to the state police.

Several former employees of the resort have come forward to allege that it was a den of prostitution and drugs.

The receptionist had allegedly refused to offer “special service” to a VIP guest before she was thrown off a bridge into a canal allegedly by Pulkit and his aides.

While asking the parents to furnish a detailed report on why they did not trust the SIT, Justice Sanjay Kumar Mishra of the high court observed that there was no reason at this stage to harbour doubts about the SIT when it had submitted to the court that it had video-recorded the resort before it was demolished on September 23 and filed the chargesheet to proceed with a murder case against the three accused.

The SIT had also said it had recovered a bag of the receptionist from her room at the resort.

Pulkit, resort manager Saurabh Bhaskar and assistant manager Ankit Gupta had allegedly taken the receptionist to Rishikesh on September 18, assaulted her and thrown her off the Chilla canal.

The police had swung into action after large-scale protests across Uttarakhand and arrested the alleged killers on September 22. The receptionist’s body was recovered the next day.

A friend of the receptionist had showed to the police WhatsApp messages in which the victim had said Pulkit was mounting pressure on her to give “special service” to a VIP who was to visit the resort on September 19.

The father of the receptionist told reporters after the court passed the order: “The government wants to protect the VIP because of whom the BJP leader’s son killed my daughter. The resort was bulldozed in a hurry within a few hours of her body being recovered from the canal. The police didn’t act from September 18 to September 21 and arrested the killers only when public protests threatened to spiral out of control on September 22. We all know that Vinod Arya’s suspension from the BJP is an eyewash. We believe he has full support of the Pushkar Singh Dhami government and so we doubt that the SIT would be able to investigate the case properly.”