The State police on Saturday defended the allegedly incriminating delay on their part to put IAS officer Sriram Venkitaraman through a blood alcohol concentration test after the vehicle he drove got involved in a fatal accident that claimed the life of journalist K.M. Basheer of Siraj newspaper here early on August 3.
In a court filing, the police said the “reluctance” on the part of the de-facto complainant, Saifudeen Haji, unit chief of Siraj, to file a first information statement had slowed up the process.
Mr. Saifudeen had slammed the report filed by Dy.SP Sheen Tharayil and termed it as part of a conspiracy to protect the local police.
His counsel S. Chandrasekharan Nair told The Hindu that the police were obligated to register a case on their own in the event of a lethal accident. Ideally, the police should have ensured that the medical officer who examined Mr. Venkitaraman initially at the General Hospital had drawn his blood to gauge the suspect’s level of inebriation.
Instead, the police had taken his blood sample nine hours after the accident at a private hospital where Mr. Venkitaraman had got himself admitted against the police counsel. The High Court had condemned the “lack of professionalism.”
Mr. Nair said his client doubted the integrity of the blood sample sent to the Chief Chemical Examiner for analysis. “If there is any residue of the sample left at the laboratory, we will take legal recourse to get it DNA tested,” he said.
Mr. Saifudeen had moved the court seeking the prosecution of the IAS officer on the charge of having conspired with the police to dodge the test and destroy evidence that would have rendered him vulnerable to prosecution for culpable homicide.
A medical board of government doctors had found that Mr. Venkitaraman suffered from retrograde amnesia. Mr. Nair said he had an expert medical opinion that persons put through dialysis often exhibited such a symptom.
Hence, he would move the court to subpoena medical records from the private hospital where Mr. Venkitaraman was treated and question the doctors who attended to him at various stages.