Agency to move local court for direction on fresh autopsy
New Delhi : In a new twist to the alleged rape and murder of two girls in Badaun in Uttar Pradesh, CBI has decided to exhume the bodies of the victims for a fresh autopsy as the probe agency feels that proper procedure was not followed while conducting the postmortem, PTI reports.
Highly-placed sources in the agency said the first post-mortem examination was conducted at night, which is usually against laid down procedures. Post-mortem examination is not conducted after sunset except in exceptional emergency cases.
Ahead of exhuming, CBI will constitute a medical board after which the agency will move a local court for direction for exhuming the bodies of the two girls for a fresh postmortem.
The move comes after the autopsy report of the state government was only suggestive of rape without conclusively proving it.
The postmortem was conducted by a lady doctor who had no prior experience of it, said the sources.
The two cousins, aged 14 and 15, went missing from their house on the night of May 27 and their bodies were found hanging from a tree in the village in Ushait area the next day. The incident had sparked nationwide outrage.
Meanwhile, CBI continued the polygraph test of the fathers of the two victims at the Central Forensic Science Laboratory.
The sources said a number of questions were put to them and a witness on the sequence of events on the night when the girls went missing, mobile phones of the girls and when the parents came to know about the incident. But the answers given were not clear.
CBI sources said four people – respective fathers of the two victims, a relative of the family and a witness – were brought here for lie-detector test as the agency is not convinced with the statements given by them.
The sources said the chain of events given by the witness had many loose ends, which needed to filled, before reaching any conclusion. They said the statement also lacked consistency.
The sources said CBI had taken three days’ time from the court in Badaun to subject these four people to polygraph or lie-detector test but if the procedure was completed earlier, they might be allowed to go.
CBI sources said they were not having doubts over the claims made by the families of the victims but to develop a flawless case, the agency needed to test the veracity of their statements.
Director General of Uttar Pradesh Police A.L. Banerjee had also raised questions about the incident.
He had claimed that the rape of one of the victims was not confirmed while suggesting that property could be one of the motives behind the crime.
The lie-detector test, which is based on the premise that certain parameters of the body fluctuate when a person is lying, measures these parameters of the person undergoing the test and presents to the investigators a graph which shows variation when a particular question is asked.