Trinamul leader Kunal Ghosh on Friday iterated his demand for the arrest of five junior doctors who had signed a note on the post-mortem carried out on the 31-year-old post graduate trainee doctor raped and murdered at the RG Kar Medical College and Hospital on August 9.
Ghosh’s demand came the morning after the Central Bureau of Investigation arrested Ashish Pandey, a house staff at RG Kar, in the financial irregularities case at the state-run teaching hospital. The CBI is investigating both the rape-murder and the corruption at RG Kar.
Pandey, some junior doctors said, was a leader of the Trinamool Congress Chhatra Parishad unit at the hospital and a close aide of Sandip Ghosh, the hospital’s former principal who has been arrested in both the cases by the CBI.
The CBI had summoned Pandey at Nizam Palace on Thursday evening and arrested him later.
“I am saying again, the CBI should immediately arrest those junior doctors who signed off on the post-mortem and the destruction of a portion of the wall [near the seminar hall where the victim was found]. The CBI should interrogate why they were engaged in trying to divert the investigation, to protect whose interests? Their names and photographs should be displayed,” Ghosh wrote in Bengali on his X (formerly Twitter) handle around 11.30am.
This is not the first time Ghosh has demanded action on the junior doctors.
On October 2, he had posted in English: “Those Junior Doctors, who signed in the PM and construction related papers; later kept silence; then took part in protest; they should be arrested and face custodial interrogation. Why this double standard game? Who are behind their stance change? CBI should arrest them.”
Five of the doctors who had signed the documents are now members of a newly formed committee at RG Kar Medical College and Hospital where the newly appointed principal heads the advisory board.
During a hearing, the three-member bench of the Supreme Court led by Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud had observed the CBI was exploring the possibility of whether the scene of the crime was tampered with, evidence was destroyed, whether there was the complicity of other persons in failing to report the crime, etc.