Doctor found with throat slit at St Stephen’s Hospital in Delhi, cops search for ‘stalker’ colleague
Delhi Police said it has questioned the friends of the doctor and is investigating the role of a colleague. Fellow doctors have threatened to go on strike if culprit is not nabbed within 24 hours
A 26-year-old resident doctor was murdered in a restroom of north Delhi’s St Stephen’s Hospital early on Friday, allegedly by a male colleague accused of stalking and assaulting him since 2016.
Shashwat Pande, a final-year postgraduate intern in the state-run hospital’s radiology department, was from a family of doctors in Allahabad.
He was on duty as a resident doctor from 4pm on Thursday to 8am on Friday. But he could not be reached over the phone since midnight.
When a hospital attendant searched for Pande around 9am on Friday, he found the door of the radiology duty room locked from outside. Staff broke the padlock and found him in a pool of blood between two benches in the restroom. His throat bore a clinical slit.
Police found that the last person to enter and exit the room was a batchmate of Pande.
“Though under suspension for allegedly harassing Pande, the suspect had illegally used his access card to quietly enter the room and slit the victim’s throat,” said Jatin Narwal, the deputy commissioner of police (North).
The killer destroyed the access control machine and used a padlock to delay any help reaching Pande before he bled to death.
The suspect is on the run and his car was found at Anand Vihar railway station in the afternoon.
“On his Facebook page, the suspect posted that he enjoyed his stay in India. It could be his plan to mislead us into believing he had left the country. But we have sent search teams to his home in Uttar Pradesh,” an investigator said.
The slain doctor’s aunt, Shubhra Pande, alleged that the suspect was stalking and threatening her nephew, forcing him to complain to hospital authorities and police.
“But hospital authorities tried to hush-up the matter,” she said.
The police officer assured that all angles mentioned by the family will be probed.
Hospital authorities said they were cooperating with police to ensure justice to Pande, whom they called the most popular resident doctor on the campus.
Pande’s mother suffered a heart attack after getting the news of his murder.