019. DEATHS IN POLICE CUSTODY

I have got a good news to give you. Our dear magazine has traveled to foreign lands. I got a tremendous response for my article "Murder by Electric Shock", published in August 1994 issue of Crime & Detective.

Quite surprisingly, one of the many letters I received was from Edinburgh, Scotland. It was from a young girl Miss Kavita Vasudeva, an 18-year old NRI living in Britain, who had come to India on a pleasure trip. She picked up this magazine at the airport while returning back to Edinburgh. In the plane she read my piece. She was so moved by it that the first thing she did after reaching Britain was to shoot off a letter to me. She says that she was quite moved by my story and asked if I was aware of any such similar instances from India. To recapitulate the memory of readers, I had talked about a case in which a husband had cunningly electrocuted his wife while she was having her bath. The case which I described was from Britain. Kavita wanted to know if anyone had used this novel method for killing in India.

Electrocution is indeed a very rare form of homicide. I am aware of very few such cases from India, but in this piece, as a rejoinder to Kavita's query, I will give a true story which is sent to me by Prof. S.P.Gupta of Faridabad, in response to the very same piece. He has sent me a cutting from "The Times of India" Aug.28,1994 (page 1, column 2-4) which gives a very interesting case of homicide by electricity from India. In this case the accused Surinder Kumar of Rohtak and Kulbir Singh of Hissar concocted a plan in which they were to hire a taxi to go to a different city. Surinder was familiar with electrical fittings and he knew that a battery attached to a transformer can generate enough voltage to kill a person. Their plan was to hire a taxi to some outside city, electrocute the driver in the way and then decamp with the taxi. The taxi was then to be sold and thus money was to be earned.

Both of them first bought a transformer and a battery for Rs. 1800 at Lajpat Rai market in New Delhi. Then they hired a taxi to go to Rohtak. The driver was a man called Munna. Surinder sat with Munna in the front seat and Kulbir sat behind. They had kept the transformer and the battery in a green bag. Near Shiela bypass, Rohtak, Surinder asked the driver to stop and said that he wanted to look up an acquaintance. As Munna was parking the car, Kulbir opened the green bag carrying the transformer and the battery, activated the connections and put the live ends to Munna's temple. Munna died instantly within 30 seconds.

Over the next two days they tried selling the taxi- a van- but one police constable heard of the abnormally low price they were offering and got suspicious. His investigations brought the whole story to light, and thus both the culprits were caught.

A very fantastic story indeed. If I had not seen the cutting myself, I would have thought that it was an excellent crime story. But the cutting is right here before my eyes. I have given the reference and all interested readers can look up the relevant paper for more details. Truth is indeed stranger than fiction! Please keep sending such material for the benefit of all our readers and I will see that all contributors get credit for their contributions. Thank you Mr. Gupta for making us aware of such an interesting case.

This time I am going to tell you an interesting case of death in police custody. On 17.9.1991 a dead body was brought to me by the area magistrate with the allegation that the said person had been beaten to death by the police. The deceased's name was Harvinder Singh and he was living illegally in Canada since almost three years. He was extradited from Canada when it was found that he did not have the necessary papers to stay in that country. This naturally caused unnecessary embarrassment to the Indian Govt. When Harvinder landed in India, police sleuths were waiting for him at the airport. He was immediately taken into custody where he died after 3 days. His father lodged a complaint with the area magistrate that Harvinder was illegally taken into police custody where he was unnecessarily tortured and it was because of this torture that he had ultimately died. Harvinder may have been living illegally in a different country, and the Indian Govt. may have been embarrassed by his extradition, but Indian police had nothing against him and thus they had no business to detain him, and certainly they were not authorized to torture him, as was alleged.

This was the background against which I had to conduct the postmortem and give an opinion. Torture cases by and large are very tricky cases, where many times we may not find any signs of injury. This is mainly because these days many refined methods of torture have appeared which do not leave any overt signs of injury. Preventing a person from sleeping is an excellent form of torture and yet it leaves no signs of injury whatsoever. However such modes rarely if ever, cause the death of a person. Where the death has occurred it is quite obvious that massive injuries have been inflicted, but many a time they are not obvious at all and certainly not in the first instance.

An unsophisticated way of torture is simple beating by lathis (the name of some special wooden clubs used in India for beating) or rods. If such a type of torture has occurred it makes our work simpler in the sense that such type of torture leaves tell-tale signs such as bruises and contusions. A typical sign of beating by rods is the formation of parallel bruises on the body, known as railway track bruises or tramline bruises .Sometimes injuries inflicted in this manner are so severe that they heal with the formation of a scar. The scar in such cases also take the shape of a railway track.

Torture by burning is also not uncommon. Such injuries are generally followed by the formation of massive ugly looking scars known as keloids. Keloid in Latin means like a claw. It certainly looks like a claw. It is an abnormal type of scar which generally forms in black skinned people after not only burns but after any type of severe injury. It differs from an ordinary scar or a hypertrophic scar. We are all aware of ordinary scars which form after cuts and lacerations. These scars do not grow in size after about 4 weeks. A hypertrophic scar on the other hand continues to grow even upto 12 weeks. It is commoner in younger people and it forms particularly after injuries such as burns. It is so common that it may be considered a normal pattern of scar formation in burn injuries. Keloid differs from both these scars in the sense that it continues to grow in size even years after the injury was sustained. Seeing such scars on the body of victims immediately tells us that the victim may have been tortured in the past perhaps by burning. In some cases we can even extrapolate the time period of the infliction of injury by noting the appearance of the keloid.

There are many other ways in which a victim can be tortured. Whipping was very common in our country in the past and even now it is being used in many parts of our country. The use of a multi-thronged whip, such as a `cat-o-nine-tails' is lot more painful, so many times this device is also used. It leaves a series of linear abrasions or superficial tears. These marks immediately give away the weapon. Sometimes there may be metal tags or knots on the ends of each thong. These metal tags cause much focal damage. By seeing these areas of damage we can even say something about the construction of the whip which was used for torture.

There are some special forms of torture too. The most common and perhaps most painful is the so-called `falanga'. This is the name given to beating of the soles of the feet with canes or rods. Its practice is going on since ancient times. The beauty of this method is that despite being very painful, it leaves little or no external signs of injury. This is because the skin and other tissues of the soles are very tough and thick, and even after taking tough beating they do not show any signs of injury. However if the investigator is careful and dissects the tissues of the sole, he may find heavy oozing of blood underneath.

Another favourite means of torture is the so-called `telefono'. It consists of repeated slapping of the sides of the head by the open palms of the assailant. I have conducted many autopsies in cases where the victims were subjected to telefono and who subsequently died of exhaustion. These cases are very tricky because externally there is hardly anything one would find. But if ears are dissected (they have to be dissected from the base of the skull),one finds the ear drums to be ruptured. By seeing the state of repair, we can say if the rupture was recent (and hence due to beating) or old.

One last form of torture must be mentioned before I move on to our case. This is known as `knee-capping'. This form is practiced in Northern Ireland. This is a form of non-fatal punishment, meted out to suspected traitors and opponents. In this method the victim is shot through the knee joint or through the lower thigh. This form of torture obviously leaves tell-tale signs and such cases pose no problems from forensic point of view.

Coming back to our case now. As I had expected there were no marks of injury visible on external examination. Opening up the thoracic, abdominal and skull cavity also did not reveal anything vital. Generally the cause of death becomes obvious after these three great cavities of the body are opened. Finally I decided to dissect the muscles of the back of the trunk and of thighs. Sure enough I found massive amount of blood there. There was more in the tissues of the sole. This indicated heavy beating by a heavy blunt weapon, perhaps by a cane. Perhaps the police wanted some sort of confession from Harvinder, which was not forthcoming. I called the magistrate and showed him the massive amount of effusion that had taken place. He was nonplussed to see such massive amount of blood, especially as he had not seen anything on the outside and he was treating this case as a routine formality. The verdict that I gave was that "the death was due to haemorrhagic shock (a clinical entity seen when massive amounts of blood are lost from the circulatory system) consequent upon beating".This was yet another case in which forensic science turned out to be a winner.

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