Father preserves rape victim’s body in salt pit in hope of fair autopsy

A man in the Nandurbar region of Maharashtra placed his deceased daughter’s body in a salt pit in his agricultural field for 44 days before demanding that it be checked again since he suspected she had been gang-raped and killed.

The 21-year-old woman’s body was shifted on Thursday from Nandurbar district in Maharashtra’s northwest to the publicly funded JJ Hospital in Mumbai. The woman was discovered hanging in Vavi, Dhadgaon taluka, Nandurbar, on August 1. The woman’s father allegedly told authorities that she was raped by four males.

At a government-run hospital in Nandurbar, a post-mortem investigation was conducted and according to the police official, the postmortem result ruled out any foul play, and a suicide case was filed. He also said that three persons had been detained in connection with the case.

He stated that the family chose to keep the body rather than cremate it since they claimed that police did not thoroughly investigate the matter. ‘We carried out the post-mortem in a government hospital and found that it was a simple suicide case. On the basis of the statements of the victim’s father, we caught Ranjeet Thackrey and later released him, as there was no offence against him’, said Shrikant Bhumre, Deputy Superintendent of Police of Dhadgaon.

Her family received the corpse on August 2. After hearing about the incident, Parineeti Phoksen, a social activist from the Thane district, travelled to the hamlet a few days ago. She spoke with P R Patil, the superintendent of police for the Nandurbar District, and demanded that the tribal family receive justice. ‘In the meeting with Bhumre, we demanded a re-autopsy be done in a government hospital in Mumbai. After his assurance, we allowed the police to take the dead body to Mumbai Thursday evening’, said a relative of the victim.

The SP instructed the Dhadgaon Police to exhume the woman’s remains and carefully examine it in response to a public uproar. A complaint was filed against the three suspects by the Dhadgaon Police. DSP Bhumre said, ‘We were satisfied with the details and statements given by the victim’s family members and relatives’.