New Delhi: Actor Sushant Singh Rajput was not murdered. He died by suicide. This has been confirmed by the medical board constituted by the forensic medicine department of AIIMS.

“It is a case of hanging and death by suicide,” Dr Sudhir Gupta, chairperson of the medical board set up to determine the manner and cause of Rajput’s death, told TOI. The actor had been found hanging in his apartment in Mumbai on June 14. “There were no injuries on the late actor’s body other than the ones caused by hanging. We did not find any marks of struggle or scuffle on the body and clothes,” Dr Gupta added.

Mumbai police had, in fact, told the CBI team in August that they were convinced it was a case of suicide and they had not detected any foul play. However, Rajput’s family lawyer, Vikas Singh, insisted as late as September 25 that it was a case of death by strangulation and that he was feeling “frustrated by the delay in the CBI over taking a decision to convert abetment of suicide to murder”.

AIIMS conducted tests on the viscera (internal organs) samples and ruled out poisoning as the cause of death. Dr Gupta, head of the forensic medicine department, said there was no trace of any poison.

The Forensic Sciences Laboratory (FSL) in Mumbai had also told Mumbai police that there was no poisoning involved in Sushant’s death.

Sources said the AIIMS team had a meeting with the CBI, which is investigating the case, to share its findings. However, it is not confirmed whether AIIMS has submitted its findings in the case in writing or not.

A team of forensic experts from AIIMS had visited Mumbai in September to inspect the late actor’s flat where he was found hanging. The team had recreated the scene of the alleged suicide. The tensile strength of the ligature material—which was a kurta—was also assessed, sources said.

The team also interviewed doctors from Cooper Hospital who had carried out the post-mortem on the 34-year-old actor to reach a conclusion since the family was saying that the actor may have been murdered. Later, the forensic unit that had conducted the post-mortem was called to the CBI guesthouse where the doctors were asked to explain how they had ruled out the possibility of ligature strangulation.

Sources in the medical board said it took more than a month to reach a conclusion on the cause and manner of death because videography of the post-mortem carried out at Cooper Hospital wasn’t available. “The hospital didn’t even have pictures of dissection of the body during autopsy,” said a source.

The source, however, added that the conclusion reached by the board was based on due diligence and analysis of all available evidence. “It is our final opinion. The job assigned to us in this case is over and should be treated as closed,” said one of the members.