Pune City police on Saturday arrested the 49-year-old mother and took custody of the 50-year-old father from judicial remand for their alleged involvement in the swapping of their minor son’s blood sample taken at the Sassoon Hospital on May 19 after the accident — in connivance with two doctors and a staffer at the state-run hospital.

Police have accused the mother of giving her blood to be swapped with that of her 17-year-old son’s sample collected to test for the presence of alcohol. The mother and the father were both produced before the court on Sunday, where the police sought their custody for further probe, including their joint interrogation.

The police earlier arrested Dr Ajay Taware, the then head of the Forensic Medicine Department of Sassoon Hospital, Dr Shrihari Harnol, who was the Casualty Medical Officer (CMO) at the time, and Atul Ghatkamble, a staffer at the morgue, for allegedly changing the minor’s blood sample in return for financial favors. The trio has since been placed under suspension and is currently in police custody.

Assistant Commissioner of Police Sunil Tambe, the investigation officer of the case, told the court on Sunday, “We want to conduct joint interrogation of the mother and father of the juvenile. We want to probe whether Dr Halnor gave the sample collected from the minor to the father and mother to be destroyed and for that we want to question Dr Halnor and the father and mother together. We want to investigate whether and how the mother and father destroyed the sample.”

The police had earlier claimed that after swapping the minor’s sample, the original sample was thrown in a dustbin.

ACP Tambe also told the court that the boy’s mother was on the run after committing the crime and they wanted to probe her whereabouts during this time. Police earlier said on Saturday that the mother was detained from her home on Saturday morning and was later placed under arrest.

ACP Tambe further told the court that they have obtained the CCTV footage from the Sassoon Hospital from May 19 and it shows the involvement of “some more suspects” in the offense and that they want to investigate the role of those suspects. The remand application also stated that the blood samples of the father and mother were to be collected for DNA analysis.

Defense counsel Prashant Patil argued that the legal provisions invoked against the mother and father of the minor were bailable and non-cognizable. He told the court that both of them have not applied for anticipatory bail and that the mother had surrendered herself before the police. He also told the court that his clients want to cooperate in the probe and that is why they should be remanded in judicial custody instead of police custody. After hearing arguments from prosecution and defense lawyers, the court remanded them in police custody till June 5.

The police custody of the two doctors and staff at Sassoon and the remand of the minor at the juvenile observation home also ended on June 5.

In the early hours of May 19, the juvenile was allegedly drunk and driving the Porsche at very high speed when the car crashed into a bike killing two software engineers Aneesh Awadhiya and Ashwini Koshta.

The Pune City police had earlier secured permission from the Juvenile Justice Board (JJB) to question the minor boy. On Saturday, the investigation team spoke to the juvenile in the presence of his mother and a district child protection officer for around an hour on the premises of the observation home. Officials said the probe team mainly asked him questions about his visits to bars and his locations before the accident, about the accident, his movements and what happened at Sassoon Hospital. A senior officer said the juvenile did not give definite answers and was not fully forthcoming. The mother was later taken to the crime branch office for questioning and she too was not fully forthcoming in her answers, the officer added.