Apollo denies foul play

NEW DELHI: After the hospital’s name got unfavourably dragged into the Rahul Mahajan controversy, Indraprastha Apollo Hospital is now going all out to do damage control. Dr Pratap Reddy, chairman of the Apollo Hospital group, flew down from Chennai and spent two days in Delhi to take stock of the situation and boost the morale of the hospital staff. Reddy arrived in Delhi soon after the city police lodged an FIR on Apollo under section 182 of the IPC for fudging facts.

On its part, the Apollo administration denies all charges levelled against them so far. Dr Shahin Nooryezdan, senior consultant, plastic surgery, took up the cudgels on behalf of the hospital and told DNA, “At no point did we ever give a clean chit to Rahul Mahajan. We never said he had not consumed drugs. We just pointed that our preliminary analysis did not suggest the presence of drugs in his urine sample. Later Dr Lal’s report corroborated our report giving a quantitative analysis of the same test.”

On the matter of the three toxicology reports with three separate findings, Dr Shahin explains, “The second urine sample was sent to Dr Lal at 9:30 am on June 2, after Mahajan was administered doses of fentanyl and medazolam as a result of which the urine sample tested positive for benzodizapine and opiates. Later as the dosage of these medicines were reduced by the time the third sample was sent at 7:30pm, the traces of benzodiapine and opiates had gone down.”