Mumbai: World's oldest comatose patient, nurse Aruna Shanbaug who had been in a vegetative state ever since she was raped, died in Mumbai's KEM Hospital on Monday morning after remaining in coma for almost 42 years, Dean Avinash Supe said.

He said police permissions and other formalities are being completed before finalising Shanbaug's last rites later on Monday.

Supe has made a public appeal to help trace any relatives or people close to Shanbaug who can get in touch with the hospital immediately.

A junior nurse, Shanbaug was brutally raped by contract sweeper boy Sohanlal B. Walmiki in the same hospital on the night of 27 November 1973 when she was changing.

While indulging in the act, he had choked her with a chain which cut off oxygen supply to her brain, resulting in injuries to the brain stem and cervical chord injury that left her in a vegetative state since then.