A fresh piece in the mystery around the death of 18-year-old aspiring Chartered Account Mishel Shaji in the backwaters of Kochi emerged on Wednesday, when a video showing her walking towards the Goshree Bridge surfaced.
TNM has accessed the video from a CCTV camera placed at the front gate of a building, which showed Mishel walking towards the bridge from the High Court junction at around 7pm on March 5.
For police and Mishel’s family, this new video adds a fresh clue to the last moments of her life. Mishel disappeared soon after, and her body was found waters near the Kochi Wharf on March 6. Before the latest video emerged, the last location that police could place Mishel at was the St Antony’s Shrine at Kaloor at around 5pm.
Footage of two men on a motorbike, who seemed to have been standing outside the shrine and started moving just as Mishel had left the shrine, had aroused the suspicion of her family. Her father had said that Mishel was a strong and smart woman, who he could not believe would commit suicide. He had raised the suspicion that the two men on the bike had been following Mishel and were somehow involved in her death.
However, one of these men had come forward as an eyewitness and claimed to have seen a woman on the Goshree bridge on that evening, but could not confirm if that had been Mishel.
The police had ruled her death as a suicide, and had reasoned that she killed herself because she was depressed over a man calling her repeatedly and compelling her to enter into a relationship with him. They had accordingly summoned a Malayali man named Cronin Alexander Baby, living and working in Chattisgarh, and arrested him on charges of abetting Mishel’s suicide, following interrogation.
However, with the family refusing to accept the suicide narrative, much popular anger had risen against the Ernakulam police. The issue even reached the Assembly, with CM Pinarayi Vijayan promising a Crime Branch probe into the death.
While the video shows that Mishel moved towards the backwaters of her own accord, there is still no evidence of what happened to her after this point.
Watch the video here: