Exercise to involve police, forensic and Forest Dept officials amid differences over cause of death
MARGAO
A “recreation of the scene” exercise will be conducted on Wednesday evening at the site where Home Guard Dinesh Gaude was found dead, as his death continues to spark controversy between the Forest Department and medico-legal officers over the exact cause of death.
Along with police personnel, Associate Professor of Forensic Medicine at GMC and in-charge of the South Goa District Hospital, Dr Madhu S G Ghodkirekar, will participate in the exercise. The Forest Department has also been asked to depute a team of officials and experts for the scene recreation.
The proposal for the exercise was initiated by Dr Madhu in view of the conflicting opinions expressed by the hospital’s medico-legal team and the Forest Department.
The cause of Gaude’s death has remained under debate ever since the Forest Department questioned the findings of the medico-legal team, which had attributed the death to a bison attack.
The Forest Department, meanwhile, urged the police to carry out a detailed investigation, including an examination of the call records of certain individuals, to ascertain the circumstances surrounding the death.
South Goa Superintendent of Police Santosh Desai, however, said preliminary investigations indicate that the Home Guard died in a bison attack. Speaking to The Goan earlier, SP Desai had stated that both the post-mortem report and eyewitness accounts pointed to death caused by a bison attack.
Deputy Conservator of Forests, Ponda, Jiss K Varkey, IFS, wrote a letter to the South Goa Superintendent of Police, with a plea to investigate Gaude’s death through analysis of call data records/tower dump in the case. However, Dr Madhu S. G. Ghodkirekar had asserted that the pattern of injuries on Gaude’s body and the internal damage were consistent with horn injuries, which could have been caused by a gaur.
He further said officials of the Forest Department have no authority to draw their own inferences regarding the cause of death. In fact, he said the damage in this case is much greater than that caused by cows or bulls, which explains everything.
