Following the Calcutta High Court’s order, Faizan Ahmed, a third-year student of Mechanical Engineering at IIT-Kharagpur, who was found dead in a hostel room of the premier institute, had his body exhumed from a cemetery in Assam on Tuesday. The purpose of the second autopsy is to uncover the “truth behind the death,” seven months after the incident took place.
The High Court has ordered conducting a second postmortem by a court-appointed forensic expert.
The 22-year-old Faizan Ahmed’s mother, Rehana, who was present for the exhumation, said to Indian Express: “There has been no peace since he died; I have not slept in all these months…No mother hopes for a day like this, but this is something we have to do for justice for him.” “Hopefully, we will know the truth, and this is one step towards that.”
On October 14, 2022, students at IIT-Kharagpur found the decomposing body of Faizan in a hostel room that was not assigned to him. While initial reports pointed to suicide as the cause of death, his family raised allegations of murder, asserting that he had been subjected to ragging on campus. The family expressed their dissatisfaction with both the police investigation and the handling of the situation by the authorities at IIT-Kharagpur.
Two weeks later, Ahmed’s family moved the Calcutta HC with an appeal to transfer the case to a special investigation team.
Following a report by a court-appointed forensic expert found two visible injury marks on the back of the victim’s head, which was not mentioned in the original postmortem report, Justice Rajasekhar Mantha of Calcutta HC said that a second postmortem is “vital and necessary for arriving at the truth behind the death of Faizan Ahmed.”
The court further noted that a bottle of sodium nitrate, typically utilized for meat preservation, was discovered at the crime scene. Additionally, it was observed that there was no odor emanating from the body for a period of three days. “The presence of this chemical Emplura (Sodium Nitrate) opens up serious questions as regards the time of death and whether it may have been used to preserve the body after the death of the victim,” read the court order.
