Autopsy reports fail time and again to help Delhi Police

New Delhi: With the postmortem of the British citizen, whose body was found in a plastic bag in southeast Delhi last Sunday, failing to identify the exact cause of his death, police investigation in yet another high-profile case has hit a roadblock due to inconclusive forensic reports.

As per police sources, doctors have not been able to conclude on the reason behind Roddick Andrew Raymond`s death while saying that the deep gashes found on the body could have developed on it due to decomposition and not actually be injury marks. Deputy Commissioner of Police (South East) P Karunakaran had said that the autopsy report is inconclusive and they would have to wait for the viscera report from Central Forensic Science Laboratory (CFSL) and other forensic reports to identify the cause of death. Earlier too, in high-profile cases like the death of Union Minister Shashi Tharoor`s wife Sunanda Pushkar, alleged murder of NRI Anmol Sarna and Nido Tania case, the postmortem reports failed to shed much light on the cases. While the Sunanda Pushkar and Anmol Sarna cases still remain a mystery, it was the CFSL report which confirmed that Nido Tania died due to "blunt trauma on head and face" whereas the initial postmortem report had not revealed "much injury or aberration" on his body. The irony is that all these postmortems were conducted by a team of doctors of All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), India`s premier medical institute. A senior police official, who did not wanted to be identified, said that in such cases, a lot of things depend on the cause and circumstances of death. "We depend on the postmortem report to a great extent for this. But in all these cases, it has not been able to give us much headway," he said. What is baffling is that all these cases are of the south and south east districts in which postmortems were conducted at AIIMS. Talking about another high-profile case which took place in the New Delhi district in November last year in which BSP leader Dhananjay Singh and his wife Jagriti, a dental surgeon, were accused of torturing and murdering a maid, a senior police official of the area said that doctors in their postmortem report had easily concluded that the death was caused due to injuries. "They had even given us the number and the nature of injuries," he said. When contacted, Dr Sudhir Gupta, Professor and Head of the Forensics department of AIIMS said, "Our role is limited to conduct postmortem and give opinion. The rest is up to the police."