A report on the RG Kar rape and murder attributed to the Central Forensic Science Laboratory (CFSL), which emerged in the public domain on Monday night, is part of the ongoing trial in the Sealdah court and CBI officers said it does not say anything that their investigation has not shown.
The 12-page report is among the exhibits of the trial. It says: “Evidences of possible struggle shown by the victim to the assailant or fight in between them [in this case under reference] found missing in the shown area of occurrence i.e wooden stage mattress and adjoining area inside the seminar hall.”
This portion of the report has raised questions among some about whether it could mean that the junior doctor was brutalised elsewhere and not at the place where her body was found on August 9.
CBI officers said there was “no confusion” in the report as the absence of any signs of struggle does not mean there was no struggle at all. “The report nowhere mentions that the woman was raped and killed somewhere else. The absence of a struggle mark on a wooden platform does not mean there was no struggle at all,” said a CBI officer.
Another CBI officer involved in the probe said the report also mentions “less possibility” of someone entering the third-floor seminar hall in the Emergency building of RG Kar Medical College and Hospital, where the body was found, without being noticed by “official attendees” who are present 24X7 in the “operational hospital corridor” and the “doctor’s duty-nursing station area”.
“If the report suggests that there was little possibility of someone entering the seminar hall unnoticed, then, logically speaking, the chances of the assailant carrying the victim’s body through the corridor would be even more remote,” the second officer said, ruling out any contradiction to their earlier findings and submissions.
The CFSL report was prepared after multiple rounds of visits to the crime scene and based on the judicial inquest, which was videographed in the presence of forensic doctors, representatives of the junior doctors and the police, officers said.
A 14-member multi-institutional medical board (MIMB) —comprising forensic experts, senior doctors and scientists — was formed to verify the findings in the CSFL report.
Sources in the CBI said Adarsh Kumar, a professor in the department of forensic medicine of the All India Institute of Medical Science, headed the medical board. Kumar visited the spot several times and deposed before the court during the trial.
“Despite having a team of experts to vet the CFSL report, a few portions of the report, such as the Bluetooth findings and the CCTV hard disc analysis report, were verified by the Chandigarh CFSL and some portions were verified by other expert institutions that specialise in the respective fields. The idea was to get the findings verified from institutions across the country so there was no margin for error,” the officer said.
The central agency has chargesheeted one person, Sanjay Roy, for the rape and murder of the junior doctor.
Although the CBI had arrested the then principal of RG Kar Medical College, Sandip Ghosh, and the then officer-in-charge of Tala police station for alleged destruction of evidence, both were granted bail as the agency could not file any chargesheet against them within 90 days of their arrest.
