Forensic medicine experts conduct second autopsy on deceased IIT Kharagpur student
Telegraph | 28 May 2023
A team of forensic medicine experts conducted over three hours a second autopsy on deceased IIT Kharagpur student Faizan Ahmed at Calcutta Medical College and Hospital on Saturday.
The remains of the body exhumed from Amolapatty Kabarsthan in Dibrugarh in Assam had been flown to Calcutta on Wednesday.
The doctors dissected the body, took notes and penned down their observations. All of it will be submitted before Calcutta High Court in the form of a report.
The post-mortem started at 3pm.
Biswajit Sukul, head of the department of forensic and state medicine at the medical college, helped forensic expert Ajay Kumar Gupta in conducting the second post-mortem in the presence of Sundarlal Hembram, a medical officer from Midnapore Medical College and Hospital who performed the first autopsy in Midnapore.
“We will soon submit the report to Calcutta High Court. All I can say at this stage is that during the course of the second post-mortem we found some discrepancies with what was reported after the first post-mortem,” Gupta told Metro on Saturday evening.
Sources in the medical college said that the second post-mortem showed certain injuries on Faixzan’s head and chest. “There was no mention of these injuries in the first post-mortem report,” said the source.
A division bench headed by the Chief Justice of Calcutta High Court had on May 20 ordered the exhumation of the remains of the IIT Kharagpur student for a second post-mortem. Justice Rajasekhar Mantha of Calcutta High Court had on April 25 ordered the exhumation of the body and the division bench of the same court on May 20 upheld the order, striking down an appeal by the state against the single judge’s order on the grounds that it was “bad in law”.
“The report is expected to be tabled before Justice Rajasekhar Mantha on June 6,” said Gupta.
Faizan’s parents were present Calcutta Medical College and Hospital on Saturday while the post-mortem was under way. Rahana Ahmed, his mother, told Metro: “I have full faith in the judiciary. They will unearth what triggered the death of Faizan. The IIT authorities have always sought to pass off the death as a case of suicide. But we firmly believe that my son was murdered by senior students because he dared to resist ragging.”
The body of Faizan, who was from Assam, was found in a hostel room on the IIT campus in October 2022.
In November, his family members moved a writ petition alleging that he was murdered and the police were inept in probing his death.
A report that the IIT Kharagpur director, V.K. Tiwari, had submitted in the high court in late January said: “In the absence of the post-mortem report to which the committee has no access, the observation of the committee is that Faizan Ahmed was suffering from mental health issues immediately before his death arising from factors (like rejection in internship). Possibility of suicide cannot be ruled out.”
Calls and text messages to Tewari from this newspaper on Saturday went unanswered.