By Ashraf Padanna/Thiruvananthapuram
The condition of Shefiq, the five-year-old boy who had been battling for life after being brutally tortured by his father and stepmother, is slowly improving.
Doctors attending to him at St Johns Hospital at Kattappana in Idukki say he has been taken off ventilator support after a successful tracheotomy, a surgical procedure that allows a person to ease breathing difficulties.
However, it might take a couple days for him to be completely out of danger, a doctor said. “He is breathing normally and moves his hands and legs slightly. These are promising signs,” Dr Nishant Paul, a neurosurgeon at the hospital, said yesterday.
“He still has swelling in the head and 75% of the brain has been damaged,” Paul added.
He said the boy was responding to medicines and had not suffered seizures yesterday.
The child had been put on ventilator support after suffering serious head injuries, a broken leg and wounds all over the body. He was brought to the hospital last week by his guardians who subjected the child to brutality allegedly to get rid of him. The parents had initially claimed the injuries were due to a fall from a ladder.
However, finding burn marks on his body, the doctors called the police.
The couple, who starved the child and left him unattended for a day after he lost consciousness, are in police custody.
They were taken to their rented house and the police have recovered an iron pipe used to torture the child. Shefiq’s body was found to have been scoured by nails.
The parents, Sherif and Aneesha, were remanded to 14 days judicial custody last week. They were also charged with torturing Shefiq’s elder brother, Shafin, also from Sherif’s first marriage, who was lodged in an orphanage.