Police sub-inspector Gopal Badane who was one of the accused in the alleged suicide of a woman doctor in Maharashtra’s Satara district has been arrested. Earlier on Saturday, another accused who is a software engineer, Prashant Bankar, was arrested in connection with the suicide case. The woman doctor had named the two men in her suicide note.
PSI Gopal Badane was arrested after he landed at the Phaltan Rural Police Station and surrendered, said Satara SP Tushar Doshi.
Prashant Bankar, accused of mentally harassing the victim and charged with abetment of suicide, was produced before a Satara district court, which remanded him to four days of police custody.
The doctor, hailing from Beed district in the Marathwada region of central Maharashtra and posted at a government hospital in Satara district, was found hanging in a hotel room in Phaltan town on Thursday night.
In her suicide note which she wrote in her palm, the doctor alleged that PSI Gopal Badane raped her on multiple occasions and Prashant Bankar was mentally harassing her. Bankar was the son of the landlord of the house where the doctor was staying.
The note read, “Badne raped me four times. He subjected me to rape, mental and physical abuse for more than five months.”
She complained multiple times about harassment, but her grievances were not addressed, a relative alleged while talking to a news channel. Another relative relative claimed the victim was pressured to change medical reports at the sub-district hospital where she worked.
“Political people in Phaltan often asked her to change medical reports as she used to be regularly on autopsy duty. She had complained multiple times against the PSI (named in the note), but her complaints were not looked into,” the relative stated.
Meanwhile, Shiv Sena (UBT) leader Ambadas Danve accused former BJP MP Ranjitsingh Naik Nimbalkar of pressurising the woman doctor on one occasion in the past. Talking to reporters, Danve claimed that two personal assistants of Nimbalkar once facilitated a call between him and the woman doctor to pressurise her to declare fit accused (brought to government hospital for medical examination after arrest) as unfit and vice versa.
Nimbalkar, in his reaction, said the allegation had no truth, and his name was being dragged into the case deliberately.
