By Mata Press Service

In an unusual move, an Indian court has ordered the clothes of four men accused of killing the mother of a B.C. businessman, to be sent to Canada for advanced forensic tests to establish that they committed the crime.

Tests are also to be conducted on a vegetable peeler, a vegetable pairing knife, a pillow and a piece of a granite baseboard seized by Indian police following the 2003 murder of Dr Asha Goel.

Her husband Dr. S.K. Goel petitioned the Mumbai High Court for the mitochondrial DNA tests to be conducted in Canada after allegations that the accused killers had washed their clothes which were splattered with the victim’s blood. Mitochondrial DNA or mtDNA tests are not as conclusive as conventional nuclear DNA tests but scientists can use the technique on samples too small to be tested by traditional methods.

Mitochondrial DNA is passed from a mother to her children, making it useful for tracing individuals’ maternal lineage. (While both sons and daughters inherit mtDNA from their mothers, only daughters can pass their mtDNA to their children.)

In the Goel murder case, if traces of the victims’ blood or hair are found on the clothes of the accused, it would go a long way to convict them.

In making his petition, Dr Goel told the court that as the clothes had been washed, it would be difficult to come to any conclusion about the accused.

Canadian laboratories, he said, were capable of finding out whose blood-stains had been there on the clothes before they were removed.

The court ordered a senior police officer to personally take the clothes and other articles for testing in Canada.

The travel costs are to be borne by the Goel family while the Canadian government filed an affidavit in the same court saying it will not charge for the tests, public prosecutor Raja Thackeray told the Mumbai Mirror.

The court ordered tests are the latest developments in a long-running quest for justice by Dr Asha Goel’s son, Vancouver travel agent Sanjay Goel and his father.

The murder of Dr. Asha Goel is rooted in a violent inheritance dispute involving some C$5 million worth of ancestral wealth and her three brothers.

The Goel family has gathered over 13,000 signatures from across North America, Europe and Africa for a petition urging Ottawa, particularly the office of Foreign Affairs Minister Pierre Pettigrew to ensure that all possible avenues of investigation are pursued, and to “compel the Indian Government to commit the necessary resources to solve this case.”

“There is no question that there were three groups involved: The first one which planned the murder, the second group which executed the murder, and a third group which did the cover-up,” Sanjay Goel told the Asian Pacific Post in an earlier interview. Indian police according to Goel, believe the crime was an offshoot of a dispute involving his mother’s three brothers over property and assets left behind by his late grandfather, a former landed Canadian immigrant himself, who died in 1986.

Goel said that since the mid-1990s, his mother’s brothers - Suresh Agarwal, Subhash Agarwal and Shekhar Agarwal – have been locked in a civil litigation in Mumbai over their inheritance. The case is still pending in court. Dr Asha Goel, who delivered more than 10,000 babies in Canada, was bludgeoned, repeatedly stabbed, slashed in the neck and her jaw was broken while trying to find an amicable solution to the family dispute.

The Goel family had set up an elaborate website (www.ashagoel.ca) to gather support in their campaign to pressure the Indian government to see through the case.They have also put up an email address (tips@ashagoel.ca) to accept tips and leads.

Sanjay Goel said his mother spent her teenage years in Mumbai.

She graduated from Topiwala National Medical College in Mumbai.