Rabya Khan has gone public for the first time since Sooraj Pancholi's name turned up in the CBI FIR connected to Disha Salian's death. She didn't name him directly. She didn't have to.

Writing on social media, Jiah Khan's mother said hearing the same name resurface in another young woman's death, six years on, left her shaken. "When I hear that the same name has surfaced in another young Disha Salian murder six years ago, it deeply saddens me and this must alarm everyone," she wrote, according to a post shared on Instagram.

Her statement isn't really about naming anyone. It's about evidence, and what happens when it goes missing.

Rabya has spent over a decade insisting her daughter's 2013 death wasn't a suicide. Jiah, who debuted opposite Amitabh Bachchan in Nishabd and went on to appear in Ghajini and Housefull, was found dead at her Mumbai home on June 3, 2013. She was 25. Pancholi, her then-boyfriend, was booked for abetment to suicide. A Special CBI Court acquitted him in 2023, citing a lack of evidence.

That outcome is the spine of Rabya's argument now. She wrote that once crucial evidence is "destroyed" or altered, investigators and grieving families are left with nothing solid to build a case on. "No wonder they have specifically said no one is accused without evidence," she said. "But when crucial evidence has already been destroyed or lost, a fresh investigation will face an enormous handicap."

She pointed to what she called "serious discrepancies" that the High Court had acknowledged in Jiah's case, and asked whether the alleged act of abetment was ever properly examined. Her fear, spelled out plainly, is that Disha's case could follow the same trajectory. "High Court order will give these accused acquittal due to no evidence," she wrote.

She went further, questioning why the system keeps failing to protect evidence that could establish the truth in cases like these. "Think why the system repeatedly fails to protect the evidence that could establish the truth," she wrote, adding that families are left "searching for answers" while a certain kind of story gets allowed to take hold. "The people are not foolish, it's different perception created to hide truth when the system tries to protect them."

Nothing here amounts to a fresh accusation against anyone in the Salian matter. Pancholi has not been named as an accused, and the CBI investigation is ongoing. What Rabya has done is flag a pattern she believes she's seen before, and ask the same question she's been asking since 2013.

Whether the CBI's fresh probe into Disha Salian's death holds up better than the case Rabya has fought for over a decade is still an open question. That answer, if it comes, will decide a lot more than one family's search for closure.