She was murdered on 23 January 1999 by an IPS officer named Ravi Kant Sharma, & her death was the subject of widespread sensationalist media coverage.
Ravi Kant Sharma was charged by prosecutors for murdering Shivani Bhatnagar for reasons that she had legal documents that he had leaked to her and she was not willing to return those to him.
It was said that she had some politically sensitive documents, relating to the St Kitts case, that she was not going to give back to Sharma and was threatening to expose him for it, so he executed her murder.
It was theorized that Shivani wanted to reveal their relationship but he did not agree so she threatened to expose it, and before doing so, Sharma had gotten her killed so she would not ruin his social status.
An ongoing 9-year trial that has had over 209 witnesses, 4 judges, and has over 20,000 pages of records running resulted with Ravi Kant Sharma on 12 October 2011 being acquitted by the High Courts after being in jail for nine years (since 2002 when he surrendered himself in to the police) and the other convicts were deemed not guilty as well due to lack of evidence.
The court states that since the records are not a directly available data from the telephone company, they appear as documents that could have been tampered with, so they did not charge Ravi Kant Sharma.