A 16-year-old girl’s body was found inside an unused well in the Nedumangad area in the Thiruvananthapuram district of Kerala on Friday evening. The body was allegedly dumped inside the well 19 days ago, and was found by the Nedumangad police following an interrogation of the girl’s mother and the mother’s partner, who were arrested from Nagercoil in Tamil Nadu. The police said that the mother has admitted to dumping her body in the unused well after the girl killed herself following an altercation. However, the police are awaiting the post mortem report to find out whether this is a case of suicide or murder.
According to Sub Inspector (SI) Sunil Gopi of the Nedumangad police station, the case came to the attention of the police after the maternal grandmother of 16-year-old Meera filed a complaint with the police that her daughter Manjoosha, who is 34-years-old, and her granddaughter have gone missing. “The police had begun investigating into this matter as a missing case after the complaint filed by Manjoosha’s mother on June 17. We had managed to track down Manjoosha through mobile tracking when she switched on her mobile phone to make a call from somewhere in Nagercoil,” SI Sunil Gopi told TNM.
On reaching Nagercoil, the police found Manjoosha with her partner Anish. “Initially while questioning the mother about the whereabouts of her daughter, she said that Meera would have gone somewhere with her friends, but on further questioning, she told a different story,” the officer said.
Manjoosha, according to the police, said that she and her daughter had had a fight inside their house earlier this month. Following the fight, Meera went inside her room and locked the door. “The mother said that when Meera wasn’t responding to them for a long time, they broke open the room to find she had killed herself,” said the police official.
The well in which the body of Meera was found.
Anish's house which is located near to the well.
Not knowing what to do, Manjoosha and Anish took the girl’s body and dumped it inside an unused well located close to Anish’s house in Karippoor in Nedumangad, she told the police.
On Saturday, residents of the area were cleaning the well and disinfecting the area when TNM visited the spot. One of the residents who lives close to the well said he and his family had no idea that the girl’s body had been dumped in it.
“We only came to know that the body was inside this well when the police officials came here on Friday evening. Normally, there would have been a bad odour, but I’m guessing the mother and her partner would have applied some chemical on the body in order to prevent it from producing a foul odour,” he told TNM.
As per the police, Manjoosha and her daughter used to live in a rented house in Nedumangad and Manjoosha had separated from her husband a long time ago. Manjoosha and Anish were arrested by the police and remanded to judicial custody for 14 days.
“We have to wait for the postmortem results to identify whether the death was a suicide or whether it was murder,” said SI Sunil.