Mystery over Kerala nun's death: medical records seized
Apr 17, 2007 - 9:42:58 PM
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The Ernakulam chief judicial magistrate did not accept the CBI's final report and directed it to conduct a fresh investigation.
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By IANS,
[RxPG] Thiruvananthapuram, April 17 - The Kerala police Tuesday raided the Chemical Examiners Laboratory here and seized the original reports of tests conducted on the body of a nun who died 15 years ago in mysterious circumstances.
The Thiruvananthapuram Chief Judicial Magistrate, acting on a petition moved Tuesday by Joemon Puthenpurackal, asked police to produce the medical records before the court the same day.
Police officials got hold of the records after a two-hour search at the lab, and handed them over to the court.
Reports indicated that some laboratory officials were not willing to cooperate with police initially.
The case pertains to 21-year-old Abhaya, who was found dead in a well in a convent on March 27, 1992.
The matter is again in the limelight after a daily last week came out with records that the manuscript of the medical report had been tampered with.
Abhaya, who was an inmate of the Pious X convent hostel near Kottayam, was originally said to have committed suicide.
But the media report said the medical report had been tempered with, and suggested that she had been raped and murdered.
Though the results of the vaginal swab were positive for semen and spermatozoa, they were reportedly corrected using a whitener and rewritten as negative in the manuscript.
R. Geetha, who had done the chemical examination in 1992 and is now chief chemical examiner, admits there were some corrections but it was not under anybody's influence.
The case is now being re-investigated by the Central Bureau of Investigation - after an order by the Ernakulam Chief Judicial Magistrate P.D. Sarangadharan in April last year.
The case, initially dismissed as suicide by the local police, was handed over to the CBI in April 1993 after an action committee approached the court seeking a central investigation.
The CBI concluded the case in November 1996 that the death was a homicide but the murderer remained untraced.
The Ernakulam chief judicial magistrate did not accept the CBI's final report and directed it to conduct a fresh investigation.
The CBI came under a cloud when its official Varghese P. Thomas, who began investigating the case, suddenly quit in 1993 saying that he was under duress from authorities to close the case as a suicide.
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