Porsche case: Two Sassoon docs held for fixing teen's blood report | Pune News - Times of India

Source: The Times of India

Pune: The crime branch on Monday morning arrested two doctors at govt-run Sassoon General Hospital -- forensic sciences department head Dr Ajay Taware and casualty medical officer Dr Shrihari Halnor -- and a staffer from the mortuary on charges of switching the blood sample of the teen involved in the May 19 accident with that of someone else.

The police said the trio acted at the behest of the underage car driver's father, a city builder, through a 'middleman' to manipulate the report that would confirm if the 17-year-old was under the influence of alcohol when he crashed a Porsche Taycan into a motorcycle, killing two techies.

A magisterial court remanded Taware (38), Halnor (35), and the mortuary staffer, Atul Ghatkamble (30), in police custody till May 30.

Pune police commissioner Amitesh Kumar said, "We have now added sections 120-B (criminal conspiracy), 213 (accepting or attempting to obtain any gratification in consideration of concealing an offence), 214 (offering bribe to another person to make them conceal an offence) and 467 (forging document which purports to be a valuable security or a will) of IPC to the accident case in which the minor car driver is in an observation home."

The arrests came after the police received the minor's blood sample reports from Sassoon hospital and an Aundh-based hospital, both of which came negative for alcohol content in blood, and got reports of the minor and his father's DNA fingerprinting from the forensic sciences laboratory, Kumar said.

"The minor's first blood sample was collected at 11am on May 19 at Sassoon hospital (eight-and-a-half hours after the accident) and the second was collected at the Aundh hospital around 7pm, to rule out the possibility of any manipulation like replacement of blood samples. Both these samples were sent for DNA fingerprinting to FSL. The DNA fingerprinting of the minor's father was done at FSL after his arrest last Tuesday in Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar," he added.