The Gandhi Hospital administration is going to write to Government Counsel of State Health and Family Welfare department stating that bodies of the four accused in the rape and murder of Disha could decompose if the bodies are preserved in freezers for some more days. They will also seek directions from the court on how long the bodies have to be preserved.
On December 9, the Telangana High Court ordered that the bodies have to be preserved till December 13. The bodies of the four accused, killed in ‘Shadnagar encounter’, were shifted from Mahbubnagar government hospital to Gandhi Hospital on December 10 and preserved in mortuary.
It was learnt that the Head of Forensic Medicine department of Gandhi Hospital has written to its superintendent Dr P Shravan Kumar stating that preserving the bodies will be difficult as there is a chance of them decomposing any time if kept for some more days.
Doctors from the government tertiary hospital said that if a body is not dissected, then it can be preserved in freezers for long duration. Since post-mortem have already been done on the four bodies, preservation has become a challenge.
The bodies are checked everyday and till date they are found to be well preserved . “But we don’t know how long can we preserve. We will seek guidelines on what is to be done,’ Dr Shravan Kumar said.
However, some forensic experts said that if the temperature is maintained at minus 3- minus 4 degrees in the freezer, a body can be preserved up to a month provided there are no power outages.
While embalming is an option to extend the duration of preservation of bodies, forensic doctors say that re-post mortem is not suggested after embalming.
“Autopsy after embalming is not suggested as original structure of tissues change. If second post-mortem is conducted after embalming, findings of first and second examinations may differ,” opined a retired government forensic doctor.
Dr Shravan Kumar said that they could embalm the four bodies only if HC passes orders to this effect.
