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New Delhi: Police investigating the rape and murder of a British teenage girl in Goa last month said they would take x-rays of her bones to determine her age, but her lawyer described it as "dilatory tactics".
Scarlett Keeling was found dead on a beach in Goa on February 18. Her passport shows she was 15.
Police originally said Keeling had drowned after taking drugs but changed their story after Keeling's mother lodged a complaint and a second autopsy suggested she had been raped and murdered.
They also arrested a man suspected of raping Keeling and were questioning him for more leads.
Senior police officers said on Tuesday they did not doubt Keeling's age but were only trying to prove her age scientifically.
Taking no chances
"We do not want to take any more chances as tomorrow someone might say that Scarlett was not a teenager," Bosco Jorge, a senior police officer, said from Goa.
"Once forensic experts have done their job, we will hand over her body to the family for burial," he said by telephone.
Keeling's mother, Fiona MacKeown, who always insisted her daughter had been raped and killed, wrote to the government saying the police did not ask for her permission to conduct new tests.
"They want to violate her body again without any reason," Vikram Varma, Mackeown's lawyer, said from Goa. "We have strongly protested and asked them not to carry out further tests as they have already done two autopsies."
Her mother argued with police officers that they could not ignore documentary evidence of Scarlett's age as given in the passport, Varma said.
"Normally ossification tests are carried only on unidentified bodies, but they are stretching this too far," Varma said on behalf of MacKeown.
Local media conjectured there could have been an attempt to play down the death after Goa's Tourism Minister, Francisco X. Pacheco, said the police had deliberately covered up the murder to hush up their failure.
"We are worried at the recent events and have set up a special police force to protect tourists," Ambika Soni, the federal tourism minister, said in Parliament on Tuesday.
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