Kannur is tense after BJP man’s murder
By Ashraf Padanna
THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: A Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) worker was hacked to death yesterday and another sustained serious injuries in an attack in the trouble-prone Kannur district.
BJP state president P K Krishnadas alleged that the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) activists carried out the attack without provocation “to divert attention from the serious crisis in the government”.
A construction worker Pramod, 33, succumbed to injuries while his party colleague Prakash is battling for life at Indira Gandhi Memorial Hospital in Thalasserry, the police said.
The incident happened in the early hours near Koothuparambha, about 25km from Kannur city.
Soon after the incident, tension gripped the Thalasserry and Panoor areas, notorious for bloody clashes between red and saffron forces.
Krishnadas said the CPI-M that leads the ruling Left Democratic front (LDF) was trying to vitiate the fragile peace in the area.
The BJP has called for a shutdown today in the district. Senior police officials are camping in the area.
In the last decade, more than 100 revenge killings have taken place in this northern district. Many maimed people roam around here as grim reminder of the political intolerance.
For Marxists, Kannur is what Nagpur is to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological patron of the BJP. It was here that communism took its first roots. Peculiar caste system and rampant economic inequality helped the red to make their penetration easy in the late forties.
But in the early sixties when the RSS started sneaking into the red fort, tension started building up between two cadre-based parties. Since then it was an eye for eye, tooth for tooth battle between the two.
Nuns, priest face ‘truth tests’ in murder case
KOTTAYAM: Two nuns and a priest here were taken yesterday to Bangalore by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to undergo truth serum tests in connection with the mysterious death of a nun, Sister Abhaya, in 1992.
The CBI team had earlier got permission from Ernakulam chief judicial magistrate P D Sarangadharan to conduct the tests on Father Jose Putarika - a former Malayalam professor at the college where Abhaya studied - and two nuns who were inmates of Abhaya’s convent.
Abhaya, an inmate of Pious X hostel near here, was found dead in the well of the convent March 27, 1992. The CBI concluded in November 1996 that the death was a homicide but the murderer remained untraced.
Thomas Kottor, the Diocesan chancellor of the Catholic Church here, was subjected to the truth serum test last month. Kottor was a professor of psychology in Abhaya’s college.
V V Augustine, a former police official, also underwent the test along with Kottor.
The decision to conducts tests on Father Putarika and the two nuns was taken after the CBI claimed it got crucial information from the tests done on Kottor and Augustine.
Three former CBI teams have failed to crack the mystery behind Abhaya’s death. The Kerala Police had earlier dismissed the case as suicide.
A new team was appointed in June after Joe Mon Puthenpurackal, a social activist who formed the Abhaya Action Committee in 1992, met the CBI director in May and demanded a fresh probe.
The 15-year-old case came back into the limelight in April after a newspaper reported that Abhaya’s medical reports had been tampered with at the Chemical Examiners Laboratory in Thiruvananthapuram.
Two officials at the laboratory, who are alleged to have tampered with the report, are currently on bail. They had undergone a medical examination at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in Delhi last week under the supervision of CBI officials. – Indo-Asian News Service |
