Sheena Bora murder: 100% DNA match buries Indrani's claim, strengthens murder case

MUMBAI: The DNA report of the bones retrieved from the Raigad forest has established that they belonged to Indrani Mukerjea’s “female child”, burying her claims of her daughter, Sheena Bora, being in the US. The Forensic Science Laboratory (FSL) in Kalina has also put to rest speculation about Mikhail Bora’s maternity by concluding that he is Indrani’s son.
Coming as it does within days of the digital matching of the skull found in Raigad with Sheena’s facial image, the police and the prosecution will no longer need to depend solely on circumstantial evidence and witness statements to build their case against Indrani, said legal experts.The scientific evidence buttresses their case, they added.
Forensic scientists said the DNA extracted from the femur (thigh bone) of the skeletal remains showed a 100% match with that of Indrani’s DNA. “It is proved beyond doubt now that the person, whose remains were found in Raigad, was Indrani’s biological child. As many as 15 of the 16 genetic markers have matched in this case. The 16th marker, which determines the gender of an individual, established that the remains were of a female,” a forensic expert said. The DNA of the bones was compared with Indrani’s profile created from her blood.
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Proof of identity of Sheena and Mikhail’s father awaits determination pending a DNA analysis of Siddhartha Das’s blood samples.
State FSL chief Satish Mathur confirmed that the report had been handed over to investigating officers on Monday.
A team of police officials and forensic experts from Mumbai had exhumed charred remains—bones, skull and teeth—from Gagode Budruk village in Pen teshil of Raigad after digging for hours on August 28. The accused driver, Shyamvar Rai, had pointed out where they had dumped the body. A team led by assistant director Shrikant Lade are said to have worked for the past 12 days, without their weekly off, to establish the DNA link.
The team hit a roadblock when the molars could not provide any DNA but then they started working on the long piece of femur bone, which they treated with chemicals to extract the DNA. The DNA profiles were checked and re-checked thrice using different approaches to weed out any room for error.
“A lot depends on the condition of bones when it comes to DNA extraction. We were lucky that despite the bones being three years old and burnt, the DNA was intact. If the samples are contaminated, we often get incomplete DNA profiles,” an expert said.
But the forensic investigation is not yet over as fragments of the femur bone will now be checked for traces of poisoning.
Earlier, a team of forensic medicine and anatomy experts from the BYL Nair Hospital had confirmed that the bones belonged to a woman between 22 and 25 years of age measuring between 153cm and 160cm in height.
The police clarified that the digital superimposition of the skull was conducted at a private institution recognized by the court and not at Nair Hospital. That too had matched with deceased Sheena's facial image.