A court in Kerala's Palakkad found 14 people guilty, of the total 16 accused, in the murder of Madhu, a tribal youth from Attappadi, who was lynched in February 2018. The Special Court for SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act in Mannarkkad pronounced the verdict on Tuesday, April 4. The quantum of sentence will be issued on Wednesday. The trial in the case began in June 2022, four years after Madhu died after being beaten up by a group of men on suspicions of stealing rice.
The trial saw several twists as many of the accused turned hostile in court and two public prosecutors resigned. There were 122 witnesses in the case. The Mannarkkad court reportedly found visuals of the crime taken by the accused themselves as evidence in the case. The court found Husain, Marakkar, Shamsudheen, Aboobacker, Siddique, Ubaid, Najeeb, Jaijumon, Sajeesh, Satheesh, Sajeev, Hareesh, Biju, and Muneer guilty. However, the fourth and 11 th accused – Aneesh and Abdul Kareem – have been acquitted.
The murder of 30-year-old Madhu rocked Kerala. He belonged to the Chindakki tribal hamlet in Palakkad’s Attappadi and mostly lived inside the forest. The mob accused him of stealing rice from a grocery shop and subjected him to torture and humiliation by beating up and making him walk for kilometres while being tied up. Photographs of the incident soon began circulating, showing a frail Madhu, his shirt torn and hands tied up with a lungi. Another picture shows a man questioning Madhu. The pictures were uploaded on social media just before Madhu was attacked.
The mob later handed Madhu over to the police; however, he died while being transported to the hospital in a police jeep. The postmortem revealed that he died of severe internal injuries. Mahdu is survived by his mother, Mallika, and two sisters — Sarasu and Chandrika. The family faced ostracism and frustration from a long-drawn-out trial and the resignation of the public prosecutors.