A team of forensic medicine experts conducted over a second autopsy on deceased IIT Kharagpur student Faizan Ahmed for three hours at Calcutta Medical College and Hospital on Saturday.
The post-mortem started at 3pm.
The remains of the body exhumed from Amolapatty Kabarsthan in Dibrugarh in Assam had been flown to Kolkata on Wednesday.
The doctors’ observations will be submitted before the high court in the form of a report. Biswajit Sukul, head of the department of forensic and state medicine at the medical college, helped forensic expert Ajay Kumar Gupta in conducting the second post-mortem in the presence of Sundarlal Hembram, a medical officer from Midnapore Medical College and Hospital who performed the first autopsy in Midnapore.
“We will submit the report soon. We have found some discrepancies with what was reported after the first post-mortem,” Gupta told The Telegraph on Saturday evening.
Sources said that the second post-mortem showed certain injuries on Faizan’s head and chest. “There was no mention of these injuries in the first post-mortem report,” said the source.
A division bench headed by the Chief Justice of Calcutta High Court had on May 20 ordered for a second post-mortem.
Justice Rajasekhar Mantha of Calcutta High Court had on April 25 ordered the exhumation of the body and the division bench of the same court on May 20 upheld the order, striking down an appeal by the state against the single judge’s order on the grounds that it was “bad in law”.
“The report is expected to be tabled before Justice Rajasekhar Mantha on June 6,” said Gupta.
Faizan’s parents were present at the hospital on Saturday while the post-mortem was on.
Rahana Ahmed, his mother, told The Telegraph: “I have full faith in the judiciary. They will unearth what triggered Faizan’s death. The IIT authorities have always sought to pass off the death as suicide. But we firmly believe that my son was murdered by senior students because he dared to resist ragging.”
Faizan’s body, a resident of Assam, was found in a hostel room on the IIT campus in October 2022. In November, his family members moved a writ petition alleging that he was murdered.
A report that the IIT Kharagpur director, V.K. Tiwari, had submitted in the high court in late January said: “In the absence of the post-mortem report to which the committee has no access, the observation of the committee is that Faizan Ahmed was suffering from mental health issues immediately before his death arising from factors (like rejection in internship). Possibility of suicide cannot be ruled out.”
Calls and text messages to Tewari on Saturday went unanswered.
