The Putrajaya hospital will conduct a postmortem operation on the body of a 20-year-old man who died mysteriously in police custody today. A Kajang magistrate, Azahaniz Teh, ordered the hospital to do a postmortem on S Tharma Rajen, a waiter from Kuala Lumpur who had been detained at the Putrajaya district police headquarters before he was admitted into the hospital for reasons not revealed.

P Uthayakumar, lawyer for the family of the deceased, said the postmortem will be done tomorrow afternoon.

A brother of the deceased, Asokan, had earlier visited the hospital morgue with Uthayakumar to identify the body.

"His lips were cut and there were blood stains on the sides of his mouth. There was also a cut measuring two inches just above his anus," Asokan, 30, told reporters at the hospital this afternoon.

According to Uthayakumar, the Kajang magistrate however refused to record Asokan's complaints on his brother's bruises and cuts. He also did not allow photographs to be taken of the body although police's Special Branch photographers were snapping away.

Grieving mother

The family said Tharma Rajen died at 12.30am today, but they were only informed of his death four hours later.

His mother, Selvamony Adaikan, 50, was crying continuously at the hospital today.

A manual worker with the Kuala Lumpur city council, Selvamony last saw her son at the hospital last night just hours before he died.

"They would not even let me go near him. They asked me to look at him behind a glass door and he was handcuffed to the bed," she said.

When she visited him during his detention in Putrajaya, she said that he complained of being cold and in pain, as well as vomiting constantly.

She was the first to see her son's body. Selvamony could be heard wailing loudly in the morgue, calling out the name of her dead son.

Police report

Besides Asokan, Selvamony and Uthayakumar, none of the other family members were allowed to see the Tharma Rajen's body.

Meanwhile, another sibling, Kumaranan, 24, a local undergraduate, lodged a police report at the Putrajaya police station this morning alleging that the authorities were responsible for the death of his younger brother.

The report stated that the family was never allowed to go near Tharma Rajen, who suffered from asthma, and that he was never fed properly throughout his detention.

It also held investigating officer Inspector Ponnaiyah Ganesan responsible for not giving timely information on Tharma Rajen's condition to his family.

The deceased's uncle, T Perisamy, 50, said he called the investigation officer on June 16 and it was only then that the family found out that Tharma Rajen had been sent to the hospital.

60-day detention

Tharma Rajen was remanded in the city police headquarters on April 3 for suspected gang activities for a week. He was then sent to the district police headquarters in Brickfields for an extended remand of two weeks before being held at the Cheras district police headquarters for one week.

When he was finally sent to the Putrajaya district police headquarters, he was already placed under a 60-day detention period under the Emergency Ordinance, a preventive detention law similar to the Internal Security Act.

Asokan had met his brother at the Kuala Lumpur Magistrate's Court two months ago where he had been brought for his remand to be extended before being sent off to Brickfields.

According to Asokan, Tharma Rajen said the police had beaten him on his legs and the soles of his feet.

When asked if Uthayakumar planned to take legal action against the police or the hospital authorities for negligence, he said that he would wait for the postmortem report first.

He also expressed his dismay at the incident. "It is sad that this tragedy has to occur just one mile away from the residence of Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad."

The police, when approached by reporters at the hospital, refused to comment.