In a shocking incident, the body of a three-month-old baby was found chewed up by rats in the mortuary at Government Area Hospital in Narasapur in Telangana's Medak district.
According to reports, the baby girl was identified as the daughter of P Kishan and Surekha. The couple had been living separately due to a family dispute.
The police said that the infant, identified as Gnathi, had been ill for a few days with a high fever, and doctors had referred her to Niloufer Hospital in Hyderabad.
However, the baby died on the way. With the husband alleging foul play in the death, the police registered a case under section 174 CrPC (suspicious death) and sent the body to the Narsapur area hospital for a postmortem.
Since it was late on Thursday, the doctors said that an autopsy would be conducted the next day.
When the mother checked on the baby on Friday morning, Surekha found the baby's face disfigured, as rats had chewed it off.
“Our daughter did not have any marks on her body. She was wrapped in a cloth and taken to the mortuary. I asked for a post-mortem only so that my husband wouldn’t say that I killed our baby due to negligence. I didn’t know it would result in this,” the mother was quoted as saying.
This is not the first such incident in the state.
In December last year, in an appalling incident at Hyderabad's Osmania hospital, the body of a 21-year-old woman preserved in the morgue, was found with her nose and parts of her face missing, allegedly chewed away by rats.
At the time, the Superintendent’s office said that all measures were in place. They claimed that the said incident took place due to the negligence of the workers, who failed to lock the storage unit properly.