Indian Police sell teenager's corpse for profit

Greed is one of the things responsible for both crooked cops and crooked politicians. The family of deceased teenager Rahul Soni is sadly all too aware of this fact, as they were unable to perform customary post-death Hindu rituals on his body, because local police officers had already sold it to a local medical college for a profit.

Rahu Soni, 18, was murdered on May, 25, 2009, in Sriganganagar, the northern-most city of Rajasthan state, India. According to The Hindu Newspaper, Rahu was discovered unconscious by police officers who, within 10 minutes of finding him, sold his body to Tantia Medical College.

The police made zero attempts to identify the body, despite a claim by Rahu’s father, Mr. Rajkumar Soni, that Rahu’s name was clearly tattooed on his hand.

Added to that, the police opted to lie about it. During an interview with the Hindu Newspaper, Mr. Soni said, “When I went to the emergency ward, I got to know there was a young boy admitted on the 25th and had died on the 26th. He was there after cremated.” While speaking with NDTV, Mr. Soni added, “We then asked them to show us the place where he was cremated so that we could perform his last rituals and gather his ashes. The police were then forced to admit that they had given his body to Tantiya Medical College.”

Four months after Rahu’s death, Mr. Soni finally took action by lodging a First Information Report (FIR) against both the Superintendent of Police and the co-administrator of Tantiya Medical College. In addition, he filed a separate FIR against four doctors and two nurses who he maintains made no attempt to save his son’s life.

Ever since this sordid story recently hit Indian headlines, the Rajasthan Assembly has been in an uproar. First of all, what the police did was clearly illegal. Under the Rajasthan Anatomical Act, the police must wait at least 48 hours before they sell an unidentified body to a medical institute. Plus the police must make a sincere effort to try and identify the body, whether by advertising in local papers or seeking out family members.

Second, an investigation by local officials revealed that the Rajasthan police may potentially have illegally sold over 20 bodies within the past 5 years.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, this event has cast a terrible shadow over Rajasthan.

Rajasthan Home Minister Shanti Dhariwal shared the Assembly’s plans with IBNLive, saying, “This issue has been brought to our notice just now. We will investigate it fully and if anyone is guilty, we will take action.”

Here’s a quick suggestion to anyone intending on visiting Rajasthan: make sure you write your name in BIG BOLD on your forehead. Just in case something happens, you don’t want to accidentally end up in a medical institution because of a bunch of greedy cops!


/Weird Asia News/