The post-mortem of a 31-year-old doctor raped and murdered in one of Kolkata’s premier government medical colleges detected a significant amount of fluid — likely semen — in her body, indicating that she could have been brutalised by more than one person, at least two media reports said on Wednesday.
One of them accessed a petition by the woman’s parents to the Calcutta high court, while the other quoted a doctor who said the autopsy report mentioned 151 milligrams of liquid from the vaginal swab. “That quantity cannot be of one person. It suggests the involvement of multiple people,” Dr Subarna Goswami, the additional general secretary of the All India Federation of Govt Doctors’ Association, told India Today.
The second report, by NDTV, cited the parents’ petition and said the autopsy found 150 mg of semen in the victim’s body, “a quantity suggesting involvement of more than one individual, further corroborated the suspicion of gang rape”. The police have arrested one person in connection with the case. The doctor’s family has narrated on camera the horrific details of the crime, saying when they saw her nude body, her legs were stretched 90 degrees apart. Details of the post-mortem report in the media suggested that there were cut marks on the victim’s hands and face. The reports indicated that a brutal blow caused shards of glass from her spectacles to break and enter her eyes. Injuries to the head and neck were reported. The Calcutta high court has handed over the case to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) amidst growing outrage.
The reports of significant amount of liquid on her body comes at a time when questions are being asked about how many people were involved in the rape and murder of the junior doctor in the seminar hall of Kolkata’s RG Kar Medical College and Hospital on August 9. The crime has shaken the country, brought the functioning of the hospital under scrutiny, led to the ouster of its principal, prompted a court intervention, triggered massive nationwide protests by the medical fraternity, and sparked a political war of words between the ruling Trinamool Congress and the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The BJP has demanded Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s resignation and touched upon the online chatter that the real culprit was being shielded because of his links to the ruling party. The TMC says the police have acted swiftly and that BJP was only trying to score a political point. In a dramatic development on Tuesday, Trinamool MLA Soumen Mahapatra accused a section of his partymen of sullying his family’s and his son’s name in connection with the case. Mahapatra said his son, also a doctor, had nothing to do with the RG Kar incident.
The police have arrested Sanjay Roy, a civic volunteer who had easy access to the hospital, for the rape-murder. Civic volunteers are a unit comprising local people created by the TMC government in 2013 to help the police in traffic management and crowd management during festivals, among others. They are paid a monthly remuneration.