Mumbai:In a freak incident of negligence, a 32-year-old Gujarati man Rajesh Maru who was attending a patient(his mother-in-law) died after he was pinned by a leaking oxygen cylinder to an MRI machine in a Mumbai hospital on Saturday evening. The Agripada police arrested Nair Hospital’s resident doctor Saurabh Lanjrekar, ward boy Vitthal Chavan and Sunita Surve on Sunday over charges of causing death due to negligence.

Maru — a garment salesman — and his brother-in-law Harish Gopal Solanki had taken Maru’s mother-in-law to the hospital at 7.30 pm on Saturday. They patient was on a stretcher and they entered the MRI room with an oxygen cylinder as per doctor’s instruction. The incident happened when they were shifting the patient to another stretcher. The MRI machine pulled the iron cylinder into the tunnel, trapping Maru’s arm inside. As the ward boy and Solanki tried to pull Maru free, his fingers were severed. A tube of the oxygen cylinder too got disconnected from the cylinder and it began leaking. Maru inhaled a huge amount of oxygen due to which he fell unconscious. Maru’s was then rushed to the ICU where he succumbed a few hours later.

MRI, or magnetic resonance imaging, machines are equipped with magnets so powerful that metallic objects like paper clips can turn into lethal projectiles if kept close by. The police said that Sonkhi blamed the hospital staff, including a cleaning woman, for keeping the MRI machine switched on in presence of metallic objects. An autopsy said Maru inhaled poisonous amounts of liquid oxygen that leaked during frantic moments to pull him to safety after his hand was crushed between the cylinder and the machine that should not have been switched on at the time.