ANGUELOVA v. BULGARIA JUDGMENT 29 (b) Application of those principles to the present case 141. The Court agrees with the Government that numerous acts of investigation were undertaken in the present case. The investigation commenced promptly and the authorities worked actively on it. An autopsy was carried out, most of the witnesses were questioned repeatedly, two confrontations and a reconstruction of the events were organised and other relevant evidence was collected and analysed. 142. The Court notes, however, that the failure of the autopsy to record morphological data and the absence or presence of “contre-coup lesions” made it impossible to establish what object might have caused the skull fracture. It is highly significant, furthermore, that the police officers were never asked to explain why the detention register had been forged, why they had not called for an ambulance right away or why they had given apparently false information to Dr Mihailov. These were crucial questions which obviously had to be raised in examinations and confrontations. The reconstruction of the events conducted on 20 March 1996 was, for reasons that are unclear, exclusively concerned with the number of times and the places where Mr Zabchekov had fallen to the ground when he had been trying to escape and ignored the events that took place at the police station, the moments between the boy's arrest and his arrival at the police station and the times when he had been lying on the ground, handcuffed to a tree or was alone with Sergeant Mutafov (C) and his friend D (see paragraphs 21, 26, 29-40 and 68 above). Furthermore, there is no record of any timely visit of the investigator to the scene of Mr Zabchekov's arrest in Beli Lom Street. The site was visited at about 11 a.m. on 29 January 1996 by a police officer from the same police station as the implicated officers. Finally, the investigation concentrated on the origin and timing of the skull injury and paid scant attention to the other traces left on the boy's body. The Government have not explained these omissions. 143. The Court also refers to its findings above that the testimony of the police officers was considered fully credible despite their suspect behaviour and that, notwithstanding the obvious contradiction between the two medical reports, the authorities accepted the conclusions of the second report without seeking to clarify the discrepancies (see paragraph 120 above). Indeed, the decisions of the prosecution authorities to put an end to the investigation relied exclusively on the opinion in the second medical report about the timing of the injury, an opinion that had been based on a questionable analysis (see paragraphs 79, 81, 84 and 88-90 above). 144. The Court finds, therefore, that the investigation lacked the requisite objectivity and thoroughness, a fact which decisively undermined its ability to establish the cause of Mr Zabchekov's death and the identity of