NEW DELHI — A murder case that has obsessed India for four years came to court Friday when a middle-class couple from Delhi stood trial on charges of killing their teenage daughter and domestic servant.

At first police blamed the servant for murdering Aarushi Talwar, 13, but now her parents are accused of stabbing them both to death in a case awash with sexual rumor, as well as charges of police incompetence and a media witchhunt.

Rajesh and Nupur Talwar, who are successful dentists, have always denied killing their daughter and Nepalese employee Hemraj Banjade in the capital’s suburb of Noida in May 2008.

The discovery kicked off fevered speculation about whether her parents had killed the two after discovering their daughter was in a relationship with the servant, or that they were killed to hide the parents’ alleged affairs.

“Our stand was that the probe of the investigating officer proves that no outsider was involved in this,” Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) counsel R.K. Saini told reporters after the decision to prosecute for murder. “Circumstantial evidence is pointing out that whatever has been done, the parents only have done it,” he said.

But major doubts have arisen over the case — not least how the police failed to gather forensic evidence properly from the scene and the way that they reversed their stance to say that they had proof of the parents’ guilt.

The judge set the next hearing for Monday. — AFP