Eleven days after an attack on the office of prominent Malayalam news portal Marunadanmalayali in Thiruvananthapuram, the police remain clueless about who was behind the attack.
The office was vandalized by a group of strangers on the night of September 4. Since the office closes around 10.30 pm, there was no one in the office as the attack happened.
The attackers had destroyed the main name board of the office, pieces of furniture were broken and window shields were broken.
“Proper enquiry will be done, nobody has been arrested yet. We have some suspicions, but need proper evidence,” Peroorkkada Circle Inspector Suresh Babu told The News Minute.
When someone says an unpleasant truth
"Marunadanmalayali has been publishing news stories that were being ignored by the mainstream, traditional media and this has gained us enough enemies," Managing Editor Shajan Skariah told The News Minute.
Skariah suspects that the attack was a retaliation to one or two news articles that had appeared on the site.
The news portal’s article on a doctor’s dismissal from one of the biggest hospital chains in Kerala for referring a patient to another hospital for the patient's convenience, had got wide attention.
“We had immense pressure from the hospital to withdraw the article. They had also approached the court seeking injunction against Marunadanmalayali,” Skariah said.
Other than bringing largely unreported stories to the limelight, the portal has been a subject of much criticism for its sensational reports, modeled after the UK's Daily Mail.
The portal’s reports against an illegal liquor bar which had been functioning in the entrails of Thiruvananthapuram Press Club had allegedly created some rivals within the media too.
A condolence note by Skariah on the death of Kerala Kaumudi photo editor SS Ram, in which he referred to alleged casteist practices in Kerala media had also received criticism.
“I received a phone call from a journalist, who abused me and threatened that he will write in his newspaper against me. As a reply for that I wrote a Facebook post hinting the bad practices of Press club and the union,” he said.
The attack happened on the same day, but investigation seems to be reaching nowhere.
