Head of the Forensic Medicine at AIIMS, Dr Sudhir Gupta, and his four-member team of experts have started studying autopsy report of late Bollywood actor Sushant Singh Rajput. Having received all the necessary medical papers, including the post-mortem and viscera reports of the late actor, the expert board started the forensic investigation on Tuesday morning.
The panel has been set-up on the request of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which is now probing the high-profile case.
Dr Gupta tells Outlook that he has no doubt they will be able to establish the cause of the actor’s death conclusively despite the fact that the scene was “badly contaminated”. He says they will be looking into the anti-depressants that the actor was believed to be using. He also questions the missing time-stamp on Rajput’s autopsy report.
The panel will mainly have to rely on the reports, original photographs from the scene of death, video footage and inquest papers. Dr Gupta will also be visiting Mumbai and talking to those who conducted the autopsy and handled the original scene at Rajput’s house.
Dr Gupta is certainly not a novice as far as handling of high-profile cases is concerned, his latest being the Telangana police encounter in which the rape accused were shot dead. His list of difficult cases includes those involving the death of Aarushi Talwar, Sunanda Pushkar, Sheena Bora, Jessica Lal and the Bhanwari Devi case of 2011 in which a minister in then Ashok Gehlot’s government in Rajasthan was arrested. He had also examined the Batla House encounter in which he insisted to carry out a simulation test for the first time.
It was Dr Gupta’s knowledge of DNA profiling that helped him crack the Bhanwari Devi case and later the Sheena Bora case. Putting together the remains of charred bones to reconstruct Sheena Bora’s skeletal and facial profile was perhaps his most challenging case. Dr Gupta’s career has also seen its shares of controversies. He had created a flutter when he had claimed in the Sunanda Pushkar case that he had been under pressure to doctor the report. He had finally concluded that the wife of Congress MP Shashi Tharoor had died of poisoning.
Dr Gupta plays down the long list of cases – many of them that made international news – that he has handled. He says it is only because of the virtue of his position as head of forensics experts of the country’s premier institute.
