Kanpur: In a bizarre turn of events, a youth in Uttar Pradesh’s Kanpur stunned the local police on Friday when he walked into a police station and requested them to stop his own postmortem—because he was very much alive.
The incident unfolded in Ghatampur, a town in the Kanpur Dehat district. Police officials were preparing to conduct the postmortem of a body that had been identified the previous evening by a woman named Suman, who claimed it was her missing brother, Ajay Shankhwar.
The body, discovered at the Ghatampur town square on Thursday, had remained unidentified for hours. With no identification documents on the deceased, police circulated photographs of the body via WhatsApp groups, seeking help in tracing the identity.
Later that evening, Suman arrived at the Ghatampur police station and identified the body as her brother’s. She said the deceased resembled Ajay closely and was wearing the same color clothes—red shirt and black trousers—as her brother often did.
Following the identification and a formal complaint from the family, police completed the inquest and sent the body to Kanpur’s mortuary for a postmortem, scheduled for Friday morning.
However, before the autopsy could be conducted, the real Ajay Shankhwar walked into the Ghatampur police station. “Sir, I am alive. Please stop my postmortem,” Ajay reportedly told the stunned officers on duty.
Ajay, a daily wage laborer at a brick kiln in Bhitargaon, explained to police that he does not own a mobile phone and usually borrows a co-worker’s phone once or twice a week to speak with his family. On Friday morning, when police came to the brick kiln inquiring about him, Ajay happened to be present. The officers were shocked to see him alive.
“They told me I had been declared dead, and that my body had been sent for postmortem,” Ajay said. “They asked me to go to Ghatampur police station immediately to confirm that I am alive, or else I would be considered dead in official records.”
Ajay did just that. Once police verified his identity, they immediately halted the autopsy process.
ACP Krishna Kant Yadav confirmed the incident, saying, “An unidentified body was found near the main crossing in Ghatampur. Based on the family’s identification, we sent the body for postmortem. However, the individual later turned up alive. We have now stopped the postmortem and are re-initiating efforts to identify the deceased.”
As news of Ajay being alive reached his family, emotions turned from grief to overwhelming relief. The case now remains open, with police trying to establish the identity of the real deceased individual, whose body is still at the mortuary.
Meanwhile, the episode has raised serious questions about the process of body identification and the reliability of visual confirmation, especially in the absence of concrete evidence like ID cards or biometrics.
A Pattern of Property Fraud
This is not the first time such a case has emerged in Uttar Pradesh. Over the past few years, multiple instances have been reported where relatives, often in connivance with local revenue officials, have falsely declared someone dead to usurp their share of ancestral property.
In several land dispute cases across districts like Azamgarh, Pratapgarh, and Unnao, victims have had to prove they are alive in court—even as government records listed them as deceased. The Ghatampur case now adds to a growing list that underscores the urgent need for more robust verification processes before declaring any person dead in official records.
