Police sub-inspector Gopal Badane and software engineer Prashant Bankar have been arrested in connection with the alleged suicide of a woman government doctor in Maharashtra’s Satara district.
Police sub-inspector Gopal Badane, accused of raping a woman doctor who died by suicide in Maharashtra’s Satara district, was arrested on Saturday evening, hours after a co-accused was taken into custody.
Earlier in the day, Phaltan police arrested software engineer Prashant Bankar, one of the two men named in the doctor’s suicide note, from Pune.
PSI Badane later surrendered at the Phaltan Rural Police Station, Satara SP Tushar Doshi said.
Bankar, accused of mentally harassing the victim and now facing abetment of suicide charges, was produced before a Satara district court, which sent him to police custody for four days.
The doctor, a native of Beed district in the Marathwada region and posted at a government hospital in Satara, was found hanging in a hotel room in Phaltan town on Thursday night.
In the suicide note, written on her palm, she alleged that police sub-inspector Badane had raped her multiple times, while Bankar, a software engineer, had mentally harassed her.
A case of rape and abetment of suicide has been registered against the two in Phaltan, Satara district. According to police, Bankar is the son of the landlord of the house where the doctor resided. She had allegedly called and chatted with him over the phone before taking her life.
Sub-inspector Badane was suspended from service after his name surfaced during the probe. The doctor was cremated at her native village in Beed’s Wadwani tehsil on Friday night.
Her relatives have demanded capital punishment for the accused. “She complained multiple times about harassment, but her grievances were not addressed,” a relative told a news channel. Another relative claimed, “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.”
Meanwhile, Shiv Sena (UBT) leader Ambadas Danve accused former BJP MP Ranjitsingh Naik Nimbalkar of pressuring the doctor on one occasion in the past. Nimbalkar denied the allegation. Talking to reporters, Danve said that two personal assistants of Nimbalkar once facilitated a call between him and the doctor to pressurise her to declare a detained accused as fit or unfit. In response, Nimbalkar said, “the allegation had no truth, and his name was being dragged into the case deliberately.”
BJP MLA Suresh Dhas demanded that the MP who allegedly tried to pressurise the woman doctor be made an accused in the case but did not name any leader.
Earlier this year, the woman doctor had reportedly submitted a reply to authorities in Satara district after a subordinate police official complained about her. In it, she mentioned facing threats from police officials over her work and taunts related to crimes in her native Beed district.
