Five doctors of the Noida civil hospital, who had carried out the postmortem analysis of skeletal remains found from a drain in this township, were on Saturday questioned by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) sleuths.
Sources in the investigating agency said that the five doctors were questioned for nearly half an hour over their role in the postmortem and a possible organ trade angle in the macabre tragedy.
Since Dec 29, police had discovered 17 skulls, bones, slippers and stained clothes of children from the drain behind the house of businessman Moninder Singh Pandher, accused of sexually abusing and killing several children of the adjacent Nithari village.
The doctors had said in the postmortem report that "the organ trade angle could not be ruled out" as they did not receive any torso among the bio-material sent for analysis.
"We cannot rule out an organ trade racket after going through the postmortem report as the torsos were not there," Binod Kumar, the chief medical officer of the government hospital of Noida, had told earlier.
Out of the 17 skulls and skeletal remains that were subjected to autopsy, 11 were of girls and the rest of boys.
{{/usCountry}}Out of the 17 skulls and skeletal remains that were subjected to autopsy, 11 were of girls and the rest of boys.
{{/usCountry}}Meanwhile, several students of a Noida college visited Nithari and planted trees in remembrance of the victims of the crime that has left the country shocked.
Pandher and the co-accused, his domestic help Surendra Koli, were arrested on December 29 for the murders of children, mainly from Nithari village that is barely 100 metres from the businessman's D-5 bungalow in Sector-31 of Noida, an IT hub of Uttar Pradesh.
Over the last two years, 38 children have gone missing from Nithari, home to over 25,000 people, mostly migrants from West Bengal, who earn their livelihood by pulling rickshaws, working as daily-wage labourers or as domestic help in the nearby residential colonies.