Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, who also heads the state’s home ministry, on Monday said the investigation into the attack on actor Saif Ali Khan is “advancing well”, and the Maharashtra police is conducting a thorough probe.

He, however, cautioned the media against spreading unverified information.

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The Mumbai police found itself in an embarrassing situation after forensic tests on 19 sets of fingerprints collected from actor Saif Ali Khan’s Bandra West residence failed to match with those of the accused, illegal Bangladeshi immigrant Shariful Islam, whose lawyer Sandeep Shikhane had claimed earlier that his client’s face does not match the face of the attacker captured by the CCTV camera at the actor’s residential complex.

All of Shariful’s fingerprints were sent to the Maharashtra state CID’s fingerprint bureau and the CID has now confirmed through a system-generated report that none of the 19 fingerprints collected from the crime scene and sent to them match the accused’s fingerprints. This report has been sent to the CID superintendent in Pune.

The development has not only cast doubt on the investigation conducted by the Mumbai police but also deepened the mystery about who is Saif Ali Khan’s real attacker whose face was captured in the CCTV camera at the actor’s residential complex.

Meanwhile, a forensic expert Professor Dinesh Rao stated that injuries mentioned in the medico-legal report submitted by Lilavati Hospital to the Bandra West police could not have been caused by a knife.

He said “lacerations” mentioned in the report signed by Dr Bhargavi Patil can be caused only by a “blunt weapon”. Incidentally, a staff nurse at Saif’s residence, who was the first to respond to the presence of the attacker, had told the police that the attacker had also carried a stick-like object as well as a hacksaw blade.

However, Lilavati Hospital doctors claimed to have removed a 2.5-inch piece of the knife used in the attack from near Saif’s spinal column and even displayed pictures of this piece of knife. The police too had claimed that they recovered a second piece of the knife in the actor’s apartment and the last piece from near the Bandra lake.

So far, Lilavati Hospital authorities have failed to respond to the observation made by forensic expert Professor Rao. Lilavati Hospital is already in the thick of a controversy about several other aspects of the Saif Ali Khan case. Its report to the police said the attack took place at 2.30 am, but the time of admission to the hospital has been mentioned as 4.11 am, raising questions about what the actor and his family did for almost two hours after the attack.

Earlier, the hospital had stated that the actor was brought to the hospital in an auto rickshaw by an adult and a child. The man was identified as Afsar Zaidi, a friend of the actor. Questions were also raised about how the actor’s friend took him to hospital while his wife, actress Kareena Kapoor stayed home as well as how the actor’s kid, Taimur, accompanied his bleeding father to the hospital.