Cooch Behar, May 6: A four-day-old baby died after a doctor in the district’s biggest hospital allegedly refused to attend to his breathing problem because the mother had not come with him.

Dr Dipankar Datta later said he thought it was the mother who was ill.

“He told us to bring the mother along without even getting out of the mosquito net that hung over his bed in a room adjacent to the emergency ward,” said the baby’s uncle Abdul Karim.

Karim and his elderly mother had taken the baby to MJN Hospital because the baby’s mother was unwell.

“The problem was that they gave me the mother’s discharge certificate and did not say they had the baby with them. That he was ill is something I came to know later,” said the doctor against whom an FIR has been lodged.

Gynaecologist Datta had supervised the child’s deli-very at the same hospital.

“Although my son was not keeping well, we were discharged on May 4,” the boy’s mother Sahida said. “Early this morning, he started having breathing problems and my in-laws took him to the hospital, while my husband stayed with me.”

The relatives reached the hospital around 4.30 am.

Turned away, Karim went home to fetch the mother as the grandmother waited with the child.

Karim had let go of the rickshaw that had brought them to the hospital and Takgachha, on the outskirts of Cooch Behar town, suddenly seemed a long way off. By the time he returned, around an hour later, the baby had died in the grandmother’s lap.

“The baby could have been saved had the doctor attended to him as soon as we brought him to the hospital,” Karim said, sobbing.

A three-member team will probe the charges against Datta, hospital superintendent Kalyan Dey said.