A volunteer who works alongside Kolkata police personnel was arrested on Saturday for rape and murder of a second-year postgraduate trainee doctor at city’s RG Kar Hospital the previous day.
Sanjay Roy was held barely six hours after a seven-member special investigation team (SIT) was set up. The 35-year-old was produced in a local court, where no lawyer agreed to represent him.
The court sent Roy to 14 days’ police custody after the public prosecutor likened the assault on the 31-year-old doctor to the 2012 Nirbhaya case. CM Mamata Banerjee said “if needed, the accused will be hanged”.
Torn earphone gave away Kolkata rapist-killer
Roy is a civic volunteer. Such volunteers help cops in non-law enforcement roles and, while they are paid by the state, they are not officially part of the force.
Recruited in 2019, Roy had on multiple occasions been posted at RG Kar Hospital’s police outpost and, therefore, had easy access to every department. What gave him away was a torn earphone found in the seminar room on the third floor of the emergency building where the doctor’s body was found early Friday. CCTV footage showed Roy entering the emergency building at 4am with a Bluetooth device plugged into his ears. When he exited the building 40 minutes later, the earphone was missing. The device later paired with his cellphone, cops said.
The postmortem report late Friday confirmed sexual assault on the doctor. The report said there were multiple signs of injuries and struggle on the body — bloodstains on the face, eyes and face, scratch marks and wounds in the private parts. A collar bone was broken.
“We arrested the accused due to his strong complicity in the case based on items collected from the spot and CCTV footage,” Kolkata police commissioner Vineet Goyal said
Investigations revealed the doctor was asleep when Roy attacked her. She and her two juniors ordered food post-midnight and at least five doctors had dinner together in the seminar room while watching Neeraj Chopra win silver in the Olympics. Post-dinner, the others left while she decided to study and rest for a while. According to sources, she was spotted sleeping in the seminar room at least till 3am.
Roy, sources said, first entered the RG Kar Hospital premises around 11pm. He was intoxicated. He left the hospital complex soon and reportedly drank some more. Around 4am, he was seen entering the emergency building. CCTV footage showed five others had accessed the area but only Roy could not explain his presence. He later confessed to the crime and admitted throttling the doctor after she put up a struggle.
Waves of protests engulfed RG Kar all through Saturday even as junior doctors, house staff and interns in other city hospitals stayed away from work demanding better security and exemplary punishment for the accused.
In her first reaction to the crime, the CM called it “despicable” and said the young doctor’s death felt “like a personal loss”. “I have directed it to be taken to a fast-track court. If needed, the accused will be hanged. Though I am not pro-capital punishment, he should be given the strictest punishment,” she told a news channel. She made it clear she had no objections if the doctor’s family demanded a probe by a central agency. The CM also acknowledged that the agitating doctors’ anger was “justified”.
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