Sandeep Ghosh, the former principal of RG Kar College and Hospital who was already in custody over a financial scam, and a station house officer (SHO) of Tala PS in Kolkata were arrested on Saturday by India’s Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on charges of tampering with evidence in the rape and murder of a trainee doctor on Aug 9. The crime sparked an unprecedented people’s protest in Kolkata and the rest of the country.
While Ghosh was in custody, the Officer-in-Charge of Tala Police Station, Abhijit Mondal, was arrested in connection with the RG Kar murder-rape case.
He is accused of misleading the investigation, tampering with evidence and place of occurrence (PO), lodging delayed FIR and not taking adequate steps regarding the probe, a CBI official told IBNS.
Mondal was officiating as the officer-in-charge of Tala police station during the occurrence of the gruesome rape and murder.
Ex-principal Sandeep Ghosh, who has already been arrested in connection with corruption case, has now been arrested in the rape-murder case.
The arrests came amid a dramatic turn of events, after the talks between Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and the protesting junior doctors failed to take place at the residence of the CM this evening. The delegation was told that the proposed meeting had been timed out owing to their delay in arriving at a decision on live-streaming.
This followed after the CM came out of her Kalighat residence first to reason with the protesters to hold a meeting without any videography or live-streaming from their side.
The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), entrusted with the investigation of the gruesome crime, on Sept 2 arrested the medical college’s ex-principal Sandip Ghosh.
Ghosh was summoned to the CGO complex office of CBI almost every day ever since the CBI undertook the investigation into the horrific incident.
The CBI also raided his house in connection with the financial irregularities at the hospital along with 15 other locations across the city,
The CBI started a probe into the corruption charges against Ghosh based on information by Akhtar Ali, the whistleblower, who had raised this matter in the Calcutta High Court, after which the Kolkata Police’s special investigation team had recorded his statement.
Akhtar Ali worked at RG Kar Medical College and Hospital for 16 years. He began as assistant superintendent in grade 2, went to grade 1, and became Deputy Superintendent.
“Before Sandeep Ghosh came, this was the number one college in eastern India. It is a 100-year-old college. I have exposed a lot of scams. The first scam was to make students fail. They used to extort money from them, those who did not listen, and some students used to collect this money,” Akhtar Ali had alleged in various media bytes.
“They used to make junior students drink alcohol and make them protest, whenever it came to Sandeep Ghosh’s transfer. The illegal activities include the smuggling of bodies, and biomedical waste scam. The complaints went to the higher levels including vigilance, but nothing happened,” Akhtar Ali said.
Ghosh has also been accused of selling unclaimed dead bodies.
The Supreme Court as well as the Calcutta High Court has repeatedly questioned why Ghosh, being the principal of the medical college when the brutal crime took place, did not lodge a police complaint.
Ghosh resigned from his post facing protests from the medical students.
Though he had resigned, the Mamata Banerjee government had controversially appointed him to a similar post at Calcutta National Medical College within a few hours.
However, the key suspect in the rape and murder case of the junior doctor so far has been identified as Sanjay Roy, a civic volunteer, who was seen on the hospital’s CCTV near the crime scene.
Sanjay Roy, Sandeep Ghosh, and some doctors whose fingerprints were taken from the seminar hall, where the junior doctor’s body was found, underwent polygraph tests.
The CCTV footage shows Sanjay Roy entering the hospital at 1.03 on the fateful night when the incident took place.
During the interrogation, the Kolkata Police showed him CCTV evidence, after which Sanjay Roy admitted to the crime after his arrest, media reports said.
