Professor held for research scholar’s death in Kerala

By Ashraf Padanna/Thiruvananthapuram

The body of K Indu, 25, a research scholar at the elite tech school, was recovered from the River Periyar near the railway bridge at Aluva some 12km off the port city of Kochi 20 months back.

The railway police and the crime branch of the Kerala police, which initially probed the case, had written it off as a case of suicide.

However, Kerala High Court, on a petition by her father Krishnan Nair in July directed the police to reopen the case and a special team headed by Inspector General (Crime Branch) B Sandhya began a fresh probe.

Yesterday, the Crime Branch recorded the arrest of K Subhash, an assistant professor at the NIT-C who was Indu’s co-passenger on the train she was travelling to Kozhikode on the fateful night. Police said he had admitted to the crime.

Both Subash and Indu hail from here and had studied together at the Noorul Islam College of Engineering, Nagercoil. The Nair girl was in love with the professor who belongs to a lower caste before her parents fixed her marriage with another boy from her caste.

Police say the youth tried to convince her of eloping to some other place outside Kerala but the girl had refused it. On their way to Kozhikode, he called her to the exit door and kicked her into the river.

Though the police had earlier subjected him to a polygraph test, he had not revealed any clue to the crime. He instead insisted that he was not aware of the woman leaving her train berth and she might have ended her life as she was not happy with the arranged marriage.

There was a wound in the back of her skull, probably after hitting something hard, and the investigators concluded that she would have hit on the front side of the head if she had jumped on her own from the train.

A man involved in sand mining nearby also gave a statement that he had seen somebody falling into the river and a man standing behind.

According to the police, Indu’s decision to marry another person had angered Subhash and he had tried to eliminate Indu tactfully. She went missing on April 24, 2011, when she was travelling on the Mangalore Express from here and two days later her body was recovered from the banks of the Periyar river.

The examination of laptops and mobile phones of the two also revealed a relationship between them. Diaries of Indu, containing some melancholic poems, were also recovered from her room at the college hostel. She was set to wed Abhishek from Kottarakkara later in the month.