CAN A TALL MAN HAVE A SEAT POSITION SO CLOSE TO THE STEERING? WHY IS THE POLICE SILENT ON THIS?

PANJIM: The police arrested Paresh Sawardekar for driving the Mercedes that brutally sniffed out three lives on the Banastarim bridge on Sunday, even as an eyewitness account by Digvijay Velingkar mentioned that a woman was driving the car

Even as the debate rages on who was driving the car, a look at the space between the steering and the position of the driver’s seat can surely throw up some relevant answers.

Amongst the hundreds of photographs and videos of the killer Mercedes, no one seems to have noticed this rather interesting detail about the gap between the steering and position of the driver’s seat.

The photographs reveal the seat and the steering were very close to each other. This normally happens when a short person is at the wheel of the car. In the case of a tall driver, the seat is pushed back. It is surprising that this aspect has been royally ignored.

This point was also raised during the Herald TV debate Point-Counterpoint by Advocate Raviraj Chodankar, who has taken up the cudgels to legally fight for justice on behalf of the accident victims.

This brings into focus the big issue of why Meghana Sawardekar, wife of the accused and owner of the car, was not being taken for an alcohol test. Shockingly, visuals in the photographs that OHeraldo has published with this story clearly show that the entire car was strewn with liquor bottles.

OHeraldo has also learned that while most of the revellers at the Nandanvan party at Khandepar left between 4:30 pm and 5:30 pm on the fateful Sunday evening, the couples – Sawardekars and another lady from South Goa, who held a very senior position in the Rotary District, and her husband and another couple from Miramar belonging to an influential family, left after 7 pm.

Now the big question is, why are the phone records of all the people at the party, who the Sawardekars could have potentially contacted after the accident, not traced? Even if calls and messages had been deleted, these could have still been retrieved and made part of the investigation material.

More and more such facts are coming to light and genuine questions are being raised. People are seriously wondering why the police are running away from these very questions, which could lead to the arrest and conviction of the real culprit.

Airbags analysis could have picked up the fingerprints of the driver, hair samples for DNA tests

The killer car was not forensically secured and local police randomly touched the dashboard and seats. When Tata Sons ex-Chairman Cyrus Mistry died in a Merc crash, a forensic examination was done immediately, car chip sent to Germany.

PANJIM: Many of the secrets and mysteries behind the sequence of events leading up to the killer Merc, including who was behind the scene, are in the car itself.

Like an aircraft, high-end Mercedes models record, capture and process a lot of data, which are not visible to the naked eye.

O Heraldo spoke to experts who know these cars inside out, as well as sources in the police department of other States, specialising in car crash investigation. According to them, the airbags that exploded could actually have fingerprint marks and some other body samples like fragments of hair, which can be used to determine and identify the driver as well as the co-passengers who were there in the car.

A study published in the National Library of Medicine states that a molecular biological analysis of deployed airbags can help to determine the occupants’ positions within a vehicle (driver or passenger status) at the time of impact. The steering wheel was observed to have the greatest number of saliva-positive samples (80%). 

As far as the Banastarim bridge gruesome accident is concerned, there appears to be no forensic intervention to secure the car and preserve the evidence, which would be critical to the investigation. Immediately after the accident, O Heraldo procured a video, which shows a policeman opening the door of the car without wearing gloves and searching the surface of the car with bare hands.

It may be recalled that after the tragic accident which took the life of former Tata Sons chairman Cyrus Mistry, the forensic team of Maharashtra police had swooped down on the accident spot to sanitise the car and secure forensic evidence.

At the same time, the microchip embedded in the Mercedes was sent to the company headquarters in Germany for further examination.