Mumbai:

A retired customs commissioner has alleged that Dr Ajay Taware, arrested in the Porsche crash case in Pune, had manipulated the gender test report of the former’s daughter-in-law in a marital dispute five years ago.

Dr Taware, head of the department of forensic medicine at Sassoon General Hospital, and two others were arrested earlier this week for allegedly swapping the blood samples of the minor accused of crashing a Porsche into a motorbike in Pune’s Kalyani Nagar and killing two persons.

Talking to PTI on Thursday, the retired official claimed that the doctor had played a role in fudging the gender test report of his estranged daughter-in-law.

He filed a complaint against Taware and others with the Medical Council of India as well as the Chief Secretary of Maharashtra but no action was taken, he said.

The customs official’s son got married in 2013, but his daughter-in-law refused to have sexual relations with her husband, he said.

When he checked her medical history and birth certificate at Aurangabad (now Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar), her birthplace, the official found that she was born a male in 1984. After ten years, the municipal corporation issued a new birth certificate mentioning her gender as female.

The daughter-in-law filed a case of dowry harassment against the family and the matter landed in a court in Andheri here.

In 2018, the court ordered a gender test of the woman. It was conducted at Sassoon Hospital in Pune, and a medical panel which included Dr Taware gave a report in February 2019 that she was “phenotypically and genotypically female”, the official said.

The test should have been conducted in Aurangabad, not in Pune, and Dr Taware manipulated the report, he claimed.

“If the car crash case gets transferred to the Central Bureau of Investigation, I will submit all the evidence against Dr Taware and others,” the former commissioner said.

Notably, in 2022, the Maharashtra government had suspended the regional organ transplant authorization committee at Pune of which Dr Taware was a member, after a racket related to kidney transplant approvals came to light.

Dr Taware is currently in the custody of Pune police.

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