Thirty-five years ago, an Australian national was arrested from the Thiruvananthapuram airport in Kerala after he was found carrying drugs in his underwear. Less than a year later, he was convicted. His family filed an appeal in the High Court. And then came a remarkable revelation – the underwear no longer fit the accused. Had it magically shrunk or was it manufactured evidence, the question arose.
The case turned out to be one of the most contentious in Kerala’s history, with several twists and turns along the way, finally ending earlier this month with an unlikely impact.
Antony Raju, a Kerala Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA), was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment and disqualified from his position. His crime? Tampering with evidence in the case, on which he had worked as a junior lawyer.
KK Jayamohan, who was the investigating officer in the case, sat down with TNM at his home in Thiruvananthapuram, recollecting the various phases of the case across three-and-a-half-decades. The retired police officer, for whom this was one of the most important cases of his career, considers the recent verdict a fair and just climax, albeit one served late.
How the case unfolded
The year was 1990. Jayamohan was posted as a Circle Inspector in Poonthura, a coastal village in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala. On April 4, at around 6 pm, he was alerted by the airport police that a foreign national was caught with a sizeable quantity (61.5 grams) of the psychotropic drug, hashish.
“Andrew Salvatore Cervelli, the Australian arrested, was barely 22 at that time,” Jayamohan recalls. “He was caught at the Thiruvananthapuram airport while on his way to take a flight to Bombay. During frisking, the airport police found the drugs on him. After their formalities, they handed him over to the Valiyathura police station, where the FIR was registered.”
Jayamohan presided over the formalities at the Valiyathura station, including seizing and sealing the primary evidence – Cervelli’s underwear, blue in colour, in which he had hidden the drugs – and more than 50 other of his personal belongings.