The blood sample of the Pune teen, whose late-night Porsche dash left two young engineers dead, may have been swapped with his mother’s sample to manipulate the alcohol test report and get him off the hook.
With the investigation into the chilling crash revealing massive irregularities in the 17-year-old’s medical examination at the state-run Sassoon Hospital, Maharashtra Medical Education had appointed a three-member committee headed by Dr Pallavi Sapale, dean of Mumbai-based Grants Medical College, to look into the matter.
The panel’s report, police sources said, has revealed that blood samples of a woman and two elderly men had been collected with the intention of switching the teen accused’s sample. Police now suspect that the teen’s mother sample had been collected as part of this plan, the sources added.
Police now plan to collect samples of some suspects to get to the bottom of this, the sources said. They are looking for the teen’s mother after they did not find her home.
The teen’s mother had earlier appeared in a video message in which she had said that a viral video purportedly featuring her son was fake. She had also appealed to the police to “protect” her son and broke down on camera.
While the teen accused is at an observation home, his realtor father and grandfather have been arrested. The family, it is alleged, tried to pressure their driver into taking the blame for the accident. If the sample under probe is found to be his mother’s, it will point to the involvement of another family member in the cover-up attempt.
Aneesh Awadhiya and Ashwini Kostha, 24-year-old engineers from Madhya Pradesh, were killed when a speeding Porsche hit their bike late on May 19. The teen, alleged to be driving the car drunk, was out on bail within 15 hours on conditions widely described as flimsy — he was asked to write a 300-word essay, told to work with traffic cops for 15 days and seek treatment for his drinking habit.
Amid growing outrage, the Juvenile Justice Board modified its order and sent him to an observation home till June 5, as a decision is taken on the police plea for permission to try the teen as an adult.
The investigation later found that the blood report of the teen accused was manipulated by switching samples. Dr Ajay Taware, head of Sassoon Hospital’s forensic medicine department, chief medical officer Dr Shrihari Halnor and staff Atul Ghatkamble have been arrested in this connection. The probe has revealed that Dr Halnor and Ghatkamble received Rs 3 lakh from Dr Taware to change the blood samples, a police officer has said.