Relatives on protest, claim body was swapped

The relatives of the deceased, Subrata Bhattacharya, refused to accept his body and protested inside the hospital throughout the day, besides ransacking a part of the hospital. “This is not the body of my uncle. We were here yesterday when the police brought his body to the hospital. But today they gave us a different body. When we tried to talk to the hospital authorities they insisted that we take this body. We cannot do that. We want the body so that we can carry out the last rites. We agitated peacefully in the hospital premises,” said Suman Bhattacharya, nephew of the victim.

The hospital authorities, however, denied any confusion and stated that the right body was given to the relatives. “We gave them the right body. Our papers are in order, but the relatives are saying that the body is of someone else. It is not possible. They had created disturbance in the hospital and we had to call the police to control them. Finally, we asked the police to conduct a DNA profiling to find out the truth,” said Harekrishna Chandra, superintendent of the hospital.

Bhattacharya (45) was found hanging in his bedroom on Sunday morning. He was a resident of Netajinagar in Jadavpur police station area. According to the police, he was depressed after the factory where he used to work shut down recently leaving him unemployed. The police had sent Bhattacharya’s body to the hospital on Sunday afternoon for the postmortem examination.

Today, some local residents had also joined the relatives of the deceased. According to the hospital authorities, they had a scuffle with the security guards of the hospital.

Previous cases
* September 18, 2007: A man and a woman were arrested for allegedly ransacking MR Bangur Hospital and beating up its staff members after the death of a patient “because of medical negligence”. According to police, Chandan Kumar Roy, 22, a resident of Behala, was admitted to the hospital around 2am on Monday with acute diarrhoea. He died around 10.30am.
* November 5, 2006: Hundreds of opposition political activists clashed with police in Kolkata on Sunday demanding a probe into the death of 22 infants in a state hospital over the past three days.