If you run a search on Jiah Khan on BBC Two, it reads: “Actor Jiah Khan was found dead in her flat. Police concluded it was suicide, but her British family believe that the truth has not yet surfaced.”
In a three episode documentary titled ‘Death in Bollywood’, the BBC explores the mysterious death of late actress Jiah Khan who allegedly died allegedly by suicide in 2013. The series is currently available only in the UK.
The first episode summary talks about how Jiah Khan died. For her British family, the truth about her death still hasn’t come out. Jiah Khan was a young actor who had starred in a number of Bollywood films, before being found dead in her Mumbai flat. Police concluded her death was suicide, but her family believe the truth has not yet surfaced. According to her family, various questions about the night of Jiah’s death still remain unanswered. They soon concluded that Jiah had been driven to suicide by her boyfriend. In Indian law, this is a crime, abetment of suicide, which carries a jail sentence of up to ten years. He denies the charge. Jiah’s mother Rabia hired a private forensic investigator, who raised questions about the forensic evidence and suggested that the police may have been too quick to conclude this was suicide.
In the second episode of the series, Khan’s sister Karishma made statements of sexual harassment of the late actor by filmmaker Sajid Khan. Jiah was the sixth women from the film industry to have accused Sajid Khan of sexual harassment in the wake of the Me Too movement that took the country by storm in 2018. Jiah was one of the actors to feature in Sajid Khan’s Housefull movie.
“When she was asked by Sajid Khan to take her top off, she came home and cried. She told me that I have a contract if I leave they can sue me and slander my name and if I stay I will be sexually harassed. So it’s a lose-lose situation. So she did the film,” Karishma said.
“I remember going to Sajid Khan’s house with my sister. I remember being around at Kitchen’s table, I was only 16 at that time. I was wearing a strappy top. He leaned on me, and started staring at me. Then he said, ‘Ohh she wants to have sex’. My sister Jiah immediately came in to my defence saying, ‘no what are you talking about’, and he said, ‘Look at the way she’s sitting’. My sister said no she said no she is innocent, she is young, it’s not what she wants. And then we left shortly after that. But I was feeling really cheap and shocked,” Karishma said.
When this clip went viral on social media, actor Kangana Ranaut tweeted: “They killed Jiah they killed Sushant and they tried to kill me, but they roam free have full support of the mafia, growing stronger and successful every year. Know the world is not ideal you are either the prey or the predator. No one will save you you have to save yourself.”
Sooraj appeared in the second episode of the documentary series, in which he repeated that he is innocent. According to Metro, he said that he was with Jiah only for five months, and that she had confided in him about her history with depression. "I'm just telling the court, please find out who the murderer is, and acquit us from this abetment to suicide (charge)," Sooraj's father, Aditya Pancholi, said in a trailer for the series. "According to her, this is not a suicide at all, so this is our case."
The last episode talks about judges who granted Rabia Khan two new investigations, first by the Mumbai Police, then by the Central Bureau of Investigation. Both concluded Jiah had died by suicide and was driven to it by her boyfriend. Jiah’s family commissioned a legal case review from a British law firm. It concluded there were faults with the investigations from the night she died onwards. Vital evidence might have been missed. The police and CBI declined to take part in the series or to respond to allegations.
