Teen Porsche driver's blood samples swapped with woman's, police tell court

The blood samples of the 17-year-old involved in a crash of Porsche car that claimed two lives in the city were replaced with those of a woman in a bid to show that he was not drunk at the time of the accident, police told a court on Thursday.

The sessions court granted the police's plea and extended till June 5 the custody of two doctors and an employee of the Sassoon General Hospital here arrested in this connection.

While the police told the court that they wanted to identify the woman whose blood was used as a replacement, a government source told PTI that she was none other than the juvenile's mother.

Dr Ajay Taware, then head of the department of forensic medicine at Sassoon hospital, medical officer Dr Shrihari Halnor and employee Atul Ghatkamble, arrested after the alleged swapping of samples came to light, were produced before the court as their initial custody ended.

Seeking their further custody, police said that Dr Halnor did not throw away the juvenile's blood samples -- as was believed earlier -- but handed it over to someone, and they wanted to recover them.

A highly-placed source in the Maharashtra public health department, familiar with the probe, told PTI that the blood samples of the teenager's mother were used as a replacement in order to shield him.

According to police, the minor driver was drunk at the time of the incident which resulted in the death of two IT professionals in the early hours of May 19 in Kalyani Nagar area of Pune city.