In a fresh twist to the controversial Sister Abhaya murder case, a city court today ordered filing of a chargesheet against Kerala's former Chief Chemical Examiner R Geetha and her assistant M Chitra, a chemical analyst, for allegedly fudging the chemical examination report of the dead nun's internal organs.
Chief Judicial Magistrate gave the go ahead for the chargesheet against the duo after it concluded that the report had been tampered with in eight places. At one point, it had said that semen stains were found in Abhaya's private parts. However, this too was found to have been scratched off and corrected as no semen stains found.
21-year-old Abhaya's body was found in a well in the Pius X convent hostel in Kottayam run by the influential Knanaya Catholics. The 1992 unnatural death case had been written off by investigators till it sprung back to headlines in May 2007 after a media expose about alleged forgery of the chemical analysis report. According to this, the report was fudged to conceal the fact that she was raped before being done to death. The case had rocked the Church hierarchy with fingers being pointed at some of the brethren. But the church denied the charges.
Following the expose, a petition was filed in the court seeking direction to register a case against Geetha and Chitra. Geetha as head of the Toxicology Department had supervised the tests with assistance from Chitra. Acting on the petition, the court seized the records and sent it for forensic analysis. The report from the Hyderabad Forensic Lab was explosive and lent credence to the charge of forgery.
In November 2008, the CBI arrested two catholic priests Thomas M Kottur and E Jose Poothrukka and a nun - Sister Sephy - in connection with the death which the agency claimed was a murder. All of them are currently on bail.
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