Contaminated drugs are likely to blame for the deaths of 13 women in central India, according to officials Saturday. The women all underwent sterilization procedures recently, and autopsies of their bodies revealed no surgical faults.

Chhattisgarh state's health minister, Amar Agarwal, said a preliminary finding led him to believe that a poisonous chemical compound, zinc phosphate, got mixed in with drugs at the manufacturing firm whose owner has since been arrested. Laboratories are expected to give their final report by Monday.

Initially, the deaths were suspected to have stemmed from septic shock.

"Our earlier claim that the deaths were due to septicemia seem to be coming off," district medical officer, Dr. M. A. Jeemani, said. "What I have gathered after the first few post-mortems is that it could be due to the administering of spurious medicines."

Dozens of women who underwent the same surgery in government-run sterilization campaign, many falling ill, and the 13 died this past week. The others are still being treated.

The state's chief medical officer, S. K. Mandal, said Saturday that the post-mortem reports did not suggest that surgeons made any mistakes in the sterilization procedures. The doctor who performed the surgeries, R. K. Gupta, has been taken into custody for accusations that he performed too many procedures in one day.

Gupta denies any responsibility for these women's deaths and blamed the medication. He said he had performed up to 10 times more surgeries per day than allowed by government protocols.

Police arrested the director of the drug manufacturing firm, Ramesh Mahawar of Mahawar Pharma Pvt. Ltd., as well as his son on Friday, charging them with fraud from a complaint from food and drug administration officials.

These large-scale female sterilizations and the subsequent health consequences have drawn public attention to the seemingly lacking health system, especially the care for poor women. Few Indian men choose to undergo vasectomies as it is culturally taboo.