Day after rape-murder, Ghosh ordered demolition at RG Kar
Times of India | 6 September 2024
Former principal of RG Kar Medical College and Hospital Sandip Ghosh (Pic credit: PTI) KOLKATA: The order to demolish a rest room for doctors and a staff toilet at R G Kar Medical College & Hospital was issued by then principal Sandip Ghosh a day after a 31-year-old PGT doctor was found raped and murdered in the seminar hall across the work area. The demolished rooms are situated diagonally across the seminar hall where the on-duty deceased doctor's body was found on the morning of Aug 9.
While officials of the PWD civil department have told CBI officers that the instruction to demolish the room and toilet had been expressly given by the ex-principal, the order (memo no RKC/4197 dated Aug 10, 2024) is evidence that the decision to undertake the renovation was taken even as the campus was on the boil over the rape-murder.
According to the memo, the decision to urgently pull down the rooms was discussed and resolved at a meeting with the principal health secretary and medical education director at RGKMCH on the morning of Aug 10. Thereafter, a 'site inspection' was carried out that very day.
Given the proximity of the work site to the seminar hall where the body of the PGT doctor was found, the timing of the decision has raised questions about the intent behind the actions. Some junior doctors suspect that the rooms that were demolished may have been linked to the crime scene in addition to seminar hall.
CBI sources said these are the very questions with which the investigators have confronted Ghosh to determine the extent of cover-up attempted by officials of RGKMCH led by Ghosh as well as health department who ratified the decision. The ex-principal is currently in CBI custody on corruption charges. "We have already suspected an attempt to alter the crime scene and intimated that to the Supreme Court," a CBI officer said. Sources said that the agency has submitted the details of the demolition to the apex court.
According to CBI, if the rooms were indeed linked to the place of occurrence, then it could have provided crucial leads to Kolkata Police and them. A 3D laser scan of a room may have revealed blood stains, finger prints, hair follicles and other traces of a person or persons present in the room. This would have helped investigators reconstruct the events and corroborate witnesses' statements. The CBI has also alleged that by the time it took over the probe on Aug 13, the crime scene had been altered.
The handwritten minutes of the meeting on Aug 10, signed by the then chest department head Dr Arunbha Dutta Chaudhuri, states that a joint inspection was carried out at the site on that very day. CBI sources said Chaudhuri, too, would be asked to explain the urgency a day after a department's doctor was brutally murdered there. Police said the room that was partially damaged was the sleep room. "There was a patient whose sleep pattern was being monitored by two doctors till 1 am on Aug 9. The two then slept there. Regarding the toilet, we had our own scientific wing checking for basic forensic evidence like blood marks. We found none," an officer said. Doctors said the doctors' room is different from the sleep clinic.