A section of protesters at Kolkata’s prestigious RG Kar Medical College And Hospital, where a trainee doctor was raped and murdered last week, says there is no clarity on who had opened the locked doors of the fourth-floor seminar hall on the night of the incident, a report on the website of a prominent Bengali daily has said.
According to a report on Anandabazar.com, resident doctors have said their ongoing protest would continue till they got answers to their questions. The head of the pulmonary medicine department, Dr Arunav Dutta Choudhury, has said that he was not aware of who accessed the keys to the seminar hall that night.
Choudhury told Anandabazar that classes in the seminar room were held till 4pm on August 8 afternoon. The 31-year-old doctor’s body was found later that night in the seminar hall.
“After the classes, the room is kept locked, and they keys are kept with ward’s sister-in-charge. [I’m] not sure of who accessed the keys,” Choudhury was quoted as saying. When asked if doctors on duty used the seminar room at night, he said he wouldn’t be able to give an answer. He had taken charge just about a week before the incident.
The report quoted sources as saying that doctors take and return the keys after informing the sister-in-charge. Nursing super Krishna Saha told Anandabazar that she didn’t know who took the keys.
Choudhury said that he had seen the body from a distance after the crime was reported and suspected from the beginning that it was an unnatural death. When asked who called up the woman’s family to say the woman died by suicide, he said: “I wouldn’t know. It was not me…I approached the seminar hall twice [when police probe was on after the detection of the body]. They didn’t let me know. I informed that to her [the victim’s] parents.”
The woman’s family has alleged that the initial call from the hospital informed them the woman died by suicide and that her parents were made to wait for three hours before they were allowed to see the body. The police have arrested one person in connection with the case.
“We have never said that there is only one person [accused]. We have said that we are waiting for scientific evidence and it takes time. Just based on rumours, I can’t arrest a young PG student, it’s against my conscience,” Kolkata Police Commissioner Vineet Goyal has said, addressing the chatter of the involvement of multiple people.
The crime has brought the functioning of the hospital under scrutiny, led to the ouster of its principal, prompted a court intervention, and sparked a political war of words between the ruling Trinamool Congress and the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The Calcutta high court has handed over the probe to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).
The BJP has demanded Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s resignation and touched upon the online chatter that the real culprit was being shielded because of his links to the ruling party. The TMC says the police have acted swiftly and that BJP was only trying to score a political point.
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