Armstrong case: Madras High Court orders retired govt. doctor to be included in team conducting autopsy on Nagendran’s body

The Madras High Court on Friday (October 10, 2025) rejected a plea made by N. Visalakshi, widow of P. Nagendran — the prime accused in the murder of Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) leader K. Armstrong — to include a doctor of her choice in a team to be constituted for conducting the post-mortem on her husband’s body.

Justice N. Sathish Kumar, however, ordered that a retired Dean of Kilpauk Medical College Hospital be included in the team of government forensic experts to be constituted for conducting the post-mortem on the body of the accused, who died at Government Stanley Hospital in Chennai on Thursday (October 9).

The judge also ordered that the entire procedure be recorded on video and that the viscera must be preserved for analysis by the forensic sciences department. The orders were passed on an urgent petition moved by the wife of the deceased, accusing the police of not admitting her ailing husband to a private hospital.

Additional Public Prosecutor (APP) K.M.D. Muhilan told the court the accused was involved in many criminal cases and that he was serving life sentence at Puzhal Central Prison in another murder case at the time of his formal arrest in connection with the Armstrong murder case.

As the convict was suffering from multiple health complications, he was treated as an in-patient at the Christian Medical College Hospital in Vellore between January 30, 2025, and April 22, 2025, and was thereafter receiving regular medical care as an outpatient at the same hospital.

A Division Bench of Justices M.S. Ramesh and V. Lakshminarayanan on August 13, 2025, directed the prison officials to move the convict to a private hospital at Chromepet in Chennai, as requested by his wife, as the medical records revealed that he required a living donor live transplantation.

Though the prison officials approached the private hosptial for admitting the convict, the hosptial authorities expressed certain difficulties in admitting him because the doctors who had treated him previously were not attached with the hospital anymore. Therefore, he was treated at the Stanley Hospital, the APP said.