HANAMKONDA: Setting at rest the speculation that Kakatiya Medical College (KMC) first-year postgraduate student Dr Dharawath Preethi may have been murdered, Warangal Commissioner of Police (CP) AV Ranganath on Friday said the post-mortem report had concluded that she had died by suicide. He said Preethi took a Pentanol injection which led to her death. The anaesthesia student had ended her life unable to bear humiliation by her senior Dr MA Saif Ali, the CP added.
Giving a blow-by-blow account of what happened which led to her suicide, Ranganath said that on February 20 she went, as usual, to the Government Maternity Hospital and wrote a care sheet of a patent along with a senior Post Graduate (PG) duty doctor.
Dr Saif who saw the care sheet copy in the WhatsApp groups of the first-year and second-year PG students, asked who had written such an incomplete report. Dr Preethi responded saying it was she who had written the report. He then pulled her up, asking her why the report was left incomplete.
Upset by the way Dr Saif was messaging her in the WhatsApp groups, Preethi wrote a personal message to him, asking him why he was targeting her and insulting her. She asked him to report to the Head of the Department or the principal if he found anything wrong with her report.
After her message, Saif, who became very angry, began texting the seniors that they should not help Preethi. When they began keeping away from her, she requested them to support her but there was no response to her plea. The CP said that before attempting suicide, Preethi called one of her seniors, Shailesh, and told him about how she was being harassed. Shailesh advised her to keep her cool and not worry too much about anything. He told her everything would work out fine in the end.
Two days later, in the early hours of February 22, Preethi, who was very much depressed, went into the staff room in MGM Hospital and injected herself with Pentanol. “We have retrieved all the conversations and messages between Preethi and Saif from their mobile phones. We came to know that Dr Saif deliberately harassed her,” said Ranganath.
He said that the police found two used injections from the emergency kit provided by the MGM Hospital for the duty doctors. The kit had three types of injections: Succinylcholine (which Preethi did not use), Midazolam, and Pentanol. The PME report concluded that the cause of the death was a Pentanol injection.
“We will file a chargesheet against Saif Ali for abetment to suicide within 10 days. Meanwhile, he was released from jail after a court granted him conditional bail.