Mumbai: Two months after Navghar Police found a man’s partially burnt, naked dead body in Mulund, a team of forensic experts was called from the civic-run King Edward Memorial (KEM) Hospital to reconstruct his face. The forensic team, led by Dr Harish Pathak from KEM Hospital, came up with a facial model of the deceased in a bid to identify him and nab his killers.
According to police, the unidentified man’s body was found at the crematorium near V G Vaze-Kelkar College in Mulund (E) on January 28. Since the deceased was found naked, with no identification marks or documents as such, police had hit a roadblock in the investigation.
“After being clueless about his identity, police sought assistance from the forensic analysts, who reconstructed the man’s face, to help us identify him. The nasal bone of the deceased was smashed, which could lead to a few discrepancies in the reconstructed facial model,” said Inspector Pratap Bhosale.
The techniques of 2D and 3D superimposition are widely used in cases of personal identification from video surveillance systems but now, this technology is also helping reconstruct faces on the basis of skull and bone measurements. Dr Harish Pathak used 3D superimposition technology to reconstruct the completely disfigured face of an unidentified body on the basis of jaw bone measurements, chin line, nose cavity and skin analysis.
In a similar case in December 2018, the same team of forensic experts had helped Thane Police crack a murder case where the headless body of a man was found, while the severed head was found in a completely disfigured state.
In the Mulund case, the deceased, presumed to be in his mid-30s, was discovered by a laboratory assistant of the college after he found the body behind college campus.
The police were immediately alerted and the body was sent to Rajawadi hospital for post-mortem. Police said, the upper half of the body was burnt and preliminary investigation revealed the deceased was stabbed in the chest, after which his throat had been slit by an unknown object.
The post-mortem report mentioned traces of a chemical on the face of the deceased, suggesting the assailant wanted to obliterate the man’s identity. Till now, police have checked more 2,000 missing persons’ reports across the country, to check if any of these profiles match that of the unidentified deceased.
Navghar Police had registered a case against unknown person/s and booked them under relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code for murder (section 302) and causing disappearance of evidence (section 201). A team from the Crime Branch is also conducting a parallel investigation in the case to detect it at the earliest.
