Sheena Bora was strangulated to death, says AIIMS forensic expert

The forensic expert who carried out medical examinations on the skeletal remains of Sheena Bora has said that the medical board constituted to carry out the examination has established that the 23-year-old woman was strangulated to death. Dr Sudhir Gupta who is the head of the forensic team at AIIMS is also the chairman of the medical board set up to carry out the tests on the skeletal remains of Sheena Bora.

New Delhi: An All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) expert, who carried out medical examinations on the skeletal remains of Sheena Bora, on Monday said that they have established that the 23-year-old woman was strangulated to death.

"We had constituted a medical board to carry out the examination and it has summed up its report. It has concluded that the cause of death is 'aphasia' as a result of manual or ligature strangulation," Dr Sudhir Gupta, head of the forensic team at AIIMS, told news agencies.

Dr Gupta is also the chairman of the medical board set up to carry out the tests on the skeletal remains of Sheena Bora that had been exhumed by the police in 2015.

"The CBI had requested us to give a holistic opinion into the Sheena Bora murder case. It already has the first post mortem report and was having second deliberations in Mumbai by Nayar hospital," Dr Gupta said.

He said that the medical exams indicate that the skeleton remains belonged to Sheena Bora as various parameters including height, age and sex are consistent with the case history.

Talking about how the medical team came to the conclusion that the woman was strangulated, Dr Gupta said: "Since the body was not intact, we had to use the theory of exclusion and negation."

"We concluded the cause of death on the basis of the theory of exclusion and negation, circumstantial evidence collected by the CBI, eyewitnesses, along with national and international literature, which suggest the theory of negation in an established way," he added.

Dr Gupta said that this deposition will help the court understand the chain of events in Sheena Bora's murder, and added that it was a case of criminal homicide because "there were clear signs of destruction of the body".

In 2012, Indrani Mukerjea along with her then-husband Peter and her former husband Sanjeev Khanna allegedly murdered her daughter Sheena over a financial dispute.

The alleged crime was uncovered three years later in 2015.

Indrani came to the notice of police after her driver, Shyamvar Rai, who was arrested in another case in August 2015, revealed the murder plot.

The police then arrested Indrani Mukerjea, Sanjeev Khanna and the driver for the alleged murder. Peter Mukerjea was put behind bars later for allegedly being involved in the murder. Peter and Indrani are now divorced.