Mumbai: CBI to drag kabrastan trust to court for defying exhumation order

The CBI probing the mysteries surrounding the death of fashion design and communication student Sanam Hasan and the subsequent swapping of her heart during the postmortem examination has decided to move court against the Versova kabrastan for refusing to allow a courtordered exhumation of her mortal remainsFour years since Sanamrsquos death at her birthday bash parents Layique Zia Hasan and Nagina Hasan still have no clue about what caused her deathSanam died under mysterious circumstances at a birthday bash planned by her friends at a rented room in a posh residential apartment in Pune in October 2012 The case was handed over from the Pune police to the CID and finally to the CBI in 2014Recently a magistrate court granted the CBI permission to exhume the body on July 26But on Monday afternoon the CBI special crime branch office at CGO Complex Navi Mumbai received a fax intimation from the kabrastan denying it permission for exhumationSanamrsquos grave at the Versova kabrastanThe kabrastan in its reply to the CBI a copy of which is with midday said ldquoWe have consulted our Muslim religious heads and they told us that as per the Sharia after the burial of a Muslim hisher grave cannot be dug up again to exhume the body and hence we strongly object to the exhumation of the body and do not permit itrdquoA CBI officer purview to the investigation said ldquoWe will submit the kabrastanrsquos letter before the court to let it decide the next course of actionrdquoA senior CBI officer said a notice under Section 91 summons to produce document or other thing of the CrPC has been issued to the kabrastanrsquos trust seeking minutes of the meeting at which the decision to deny exhumation was taken ldquoWe will produce the denial letter and the minutes of the meeting before the courtrdquoWhy exhume nowThe case has witnessed a series of blunders with botched up postmortem examination and histopathology reports throwing up ridiculous findings of Sanam being male and suffering from ischemic heart disease and of her DNA not matching that of her parentsExhumation said the CBI officer will allow the investigators to match the corpsersquos DNA with that of the parents and thereby confirm if it is indeed Sanamrsquos mortal remainsAsked what leads could a corpse provide four years after burial he said ldquoWe want to see if the heart was mismatched due to negligence or was it intentional After the reports of the central forensic science laboratories FSLs in Kalina and Hyderabad pointed to the fact that the samples provided were not those of Sanam we sent the samples to the Central FSL in Delhi Its reports are awaitedrdquoPrecedentThe kabrastan had made its stand clear much before it had put up a stiff resistance even when Sanamrsquos family had requested the exhumation Sanamrsquos father Layique Zia Hasan 57 said he visited the kabrastan again last Sunday with a copy of middayrsquos report that day on the roadblocks in the investigation in the case hoping to prevail over members of the kabrastan trustAmid pleas to allow the CBI to do its job Hasan even cited a precedent at the same graveyardmdash the exhumation in September 2013 of Rameez Chouglersquos mortal remains to solve the mystery of his and sister Rehabrsquos sudden deaths A postexhumation examination of Rameezrsquos corpse had revealed that the siblings had died of pesticide poisoningThe trust members told Hasan that they had made an exception in Rameezrsquos case because he had been buried just two months prior to the exhumation plea ldquoThey said they knew his body would not have decomposed much But they are refusing Sanamrsquos exhumation due to the fouryear delayrdquo said HasanWhen the pleas failed Hasan even told the trust members that the order for exhumation had come from court and so they had to cooperate with the CBI But even this failed to do the trick ldquoThey asked me for a copy of the court order but I didnrsquot have it with me The trust members assured me that once a copy of the court order is submitted to them they may again call for a committee meeting and take a final callrdquo said the fatherThe CBI officer said the agency will forward a copy of the court order to the kabrastan