One doctor said she got nervous because of an angry crowd outside the hospital and so couldn’t do any test on the two victims; another doctor said that for the vaginal swabs, he had to buy slides from the market since there was none in the hospital; a third said there was no microscope; one slide fell and broke; the envelope in which the slides were kept had to be sent back for re-sealing before the lab could accept it; the lab report sat for four days for the police chief to come back from leave.

Such is the startling trail of the vaginal swabs of the two Shopian rape and murder victims — a trail that finally led to the collapse of the DNA evidence when the CBI’s Central Forensic Laboratory ruled yesterday that the swabs didn’t belong to the victims. And the spermatozoa didn’t match the blood samples of the four arrested police officers.

In fact, the Special Investigation Team probing the case — under the supervision of the J&K High Court — today raided the office of the Chief Medical Officer, Pulwama District Hospital, sealed records, including the medico-legal register and the doctors’ roster.

Consider the sequence of events that led to the DNA tests falling through:

1. The night after their disappearance, when the bodies of Neelofar (22) and her sister-in-law Aasiya (17) were recovered from the Rambiyar stream in Shopian on May 30, a local team of doctors Bilal, Nazia and Bilques were called to the site for the post-mortem. Nazia told the Justice Jan Commission that vaginal examination of the bodies could not be conducted because rigor mortis had set in. Bilques deposed that when she put on her glove, she was “scared” of the crowd and could not perform any test.

... contd.