Days after the Kerala High Court ordered a retrial in the sensational Walayar case, the LDF government on Monday decided to hand over to the CBI the probe into the death of two minor sisters after alleged sexual assault in 2017.

The decision was taken based on the request of the family of the children, a senior official in the Chief Minister's Office (CMO) told PTI.

Allowing appeals filed by the state government and the mother of the children, the high court had on January 6 ordered a retrial in the case, observing that there were serious lapses in the investigation and that there has been miscarriage of justice.

A division bench of Justices A Hariprasad and M R Anitha had set aside a October 2019 order of POCSO (Special Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) court acquitting the five accused in the case for want of evidence.

The eldest of the siblings aged 13 was found hanging inside their hut in Walayar in Palakkad district on January 13, 2017 and the younger sister (9) on March 4 the same year.

Both were allegedly sexually assaulted.

The parents of the girls had earlier sought a CBI probe and had met Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan seeking a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) enquiry into the case. They submitted a petition to the CM’s office in the Government Secratariat in Thiruvananthapuram. In the petition, they alleged that though the Chief Minister had promised justice for their daughters, it was broken in 2019 when all the accused in the case were acquitted. It is also stated that if the police had inquired into the older child's death properly, the death of the second child could have been avoided.

Public outcry and protests had erupted in the state after the acquittal of the accused, seeking justice to the family of the girls.

The state government had on November 18, 2019 removed the Public Prosecutor who handled the case and later filed the appeal in the high court.