At the mortuary in South Mumbai’s JJ Hospital, forensic doctors keep a constant vigil on a digital display board. The simple display in the cold storage room usually shows the temperature set at below 4 degrees Celsius — key to ensuring that the most critical evidence in the 26/11 terror attack case remains well-preserved. The evidence: the bodies of the nine terrorists gunned down by security forces.

Nobody enters the room, the contents of its nine cabinets unchanged for a year now. “Frequent opening of the door can be harmful,” explains a doctor attached to JJ’s Forensic Medicine Department, adding that temperature variations could expedite the process of decomposition, something the department’s best doctors have been working to defer for as long as possible.

After all, according to forensic experts, this is the longest that any unclaimed body has been preserved in India. The longest any human remains were preserved in a Mumbai morgue, until now, was the dismembered head of a male — suspected to be a terrorist but later ruled out — after the 7/11 serial blasts aboard Mumbai’s local trains in 2006. In that case, the face was reconstructed and the skull preserved for 128 days before the police disposed it, burying the remains according to Muslim rituals.

So, a team of medical and paramedical staff takes two rounds daily to check the room temperature. Entry inside is restricted to the bare minimum authorised technical and medical staff. “Since the bodies have been kept for so long, the room has been kept locked for days at a stretch with security staff keeping a watch,” says the doctor.

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