Published on: Sept 15, 2025 09:31 pm IST
While police said after post mortem examination that both the BJP workers had accidentally died of electrocution, their families and the party brought charges of communal killings
Kolkata: The Calcutta high court on Monday directed the West Bengal government to form a medical board to examine the discrepancies found in the reports of two post mortem examinations done on two Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) workers killed in East Midnapore district in July, lawyers who attended the hearing said.
“The division bench of justices Debangsu Basak and Md Shabbar Rashidi said the discrepancies in the reports of the back-to-back post mortems must be examined by a team of senior doctors. The state was directed to file the report by September 18, the next date of hearing,” a lawyer said, requesting anonymity.
The BJP workers, Sudhir Chandra Paik, 65, and Sujit Das, 23, died on July 12 at a village dance competition organised on the occasion of Muharram in East Midnapore’s Khejuri. While the local police said after post mortem examination that both accidentally died of electrocution, their families and BJP brought charges of communal killing.
The families moved the high court demanding a second post mortem examination.
Since a single bench did not accept the petition, the families moved the division bench of justices Basak and Rashidi. The division bench ordered a second autopsy under the supervision of three senior doctors from the state-run SSKM hospital and said the report should be filed before the single bench of justice Tirthankar Ghosh.
On August 26, justice Ghosh directed the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) of the West Bengal police to probe the case.
“The reports of the first and second post-mortems are not totally tallying,” justice Ghosh observed during a hearing on August 25, adding that the discrepancies made fair judgement impossible.
During the last hearing on September 8, the division bench raised questions on the role of the police officer who initially investigated the alleged murders. After going through the phone call records of the people involved in the investigation, the bench asked why the doctor who conducted the first post mortem examination was called up by the investigating officer (IO) several times before and after the autopsy.
