The Delhi High Court on Thursday directed a judicial magistrate to complete within three weeks an enquiry into the “missing” eyeball of a dead man, a life convict, from the mortuary of a Government hospital. As per a plea, Rajkumar, who was undergoing life sentence for killing his wife, was admitted in Rajan Babu Institute of Pulmonary Medicine and Tuberculosis (RBIPMT), a Government-run hospital, for TB on November 27, 2013 and died on December 9.
His body was kept in the hospital’s mortuary. When the body was shifted to another hospital (Babu Jagjivan Ram) for post-mortem as RBIPMT does not have the facility to conduct autopsy, it was found that his right eyeball and soft tissue of earlobe pinna was missing, the plea said. A bench of justices Kailash Gambhir and Indermeet Kaur said “since the said aspect of missing of right eyeball of the victim and missing of soft tissue of the lower half of pinna of the victim is a shocking incident and it is required to be given primacy, we accordingly direct the magistrate (judicial) to complete the inquiry at the first instance and submit its report within a period of three weeks”.