With the post-mortem of the British citizen, whose body was found in a plastic bag in South-East Delhi last Sunday, failing to identify the exact cause of his death, Delhi Police investigation in yet another high-profile case has hit a roadblock due to inconclusive forensic reports. Forensic experts in India’s premier All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) have failed to provide a plausible cause of death. In the absence of inconclusive autopsy reports, the police investigations have been hampered.

As per police sources, doctors have not been able to conclude the reason behind Roddick Andrew Raymond’s death while saying that the deep gashes found on the body could have developed on it due to decomposition and not be actual injury marks.

Deputy Commissioner of Police (South-East) P Karunakaran had said that the autopsy report is inconclusive and they would have to wait for the viscera report from Central Forensic Science laboratory (CFSl) and other forensic reports to identify the cause of death. Earlier too, in high-profile cases like the death of Union Minister Shashi Tharoor’s wife Sunanda Pushkar, alleged murder of Non-Resident Indian (NRI) Anmol Sarna and Nido Tania, the post-mortem reports failed to shed much light on the cases.

While the Sunanda Pushkar and Anmol Sarna cases still remain a mystery, it was the CFSl report which confirmed that Nido Tania died due to “blunt trauma on head and face” whereas the initial postmortem report had not revealed “much injury or aberration” on his body. The irony is that all these post-mortems were conducted by a team of doctors of AIIMS.

A senior police official, who did not wanted to be identified, said in such cases, a lot of things depend on the cause and circumstances of death. “We depend on the post-mortem report to a great extent for this. But in all these cases, it has not been able to give us much headway,” he said. What is baffling is that all these cases are of the South and South-East districts in which post-mortems were conducted at AIIMS.

Talking about another high-profile case which took place in the New Delhi district in November last year in which BSP leader Dhananjay Singh and his wife Jagriti, a dental surgeon, were accused of torturing and murdering a maid, a senior police official of the area said that doctors in their post-mortem report had easily concluded that the death was caused due to injuries. “They had even given us the number and the nature of injuries,” he said. When contacted, Dr Sudhir Gupta, Professor and Head of the Forensics department of AIIMS said, “Our role is limited to conduct post-mortem and give opinion. The rest is up to the police.”