The Kerala High Court on Friday, October 21, dismissed a plea filed by the three accused in the Elanthoor human sacrifice case, in which two women were brutally killed in the name of ritual sacrifice, seeking to quash a magisterial court decision granting their custody to the police for 12 days. The court held that there was nothing wrong with the order. It, however, allowed each of the accused to meet their lawyer for 15 minutes on Friday and Sunday.
The accused, in the plea filed through lawyer B A Aloor, had sought permission to meet lawyers during the period of police custody or investigation. When the matter was taken up, the Director General of Prosecution said the investigation has to be carried out at various levels and the accused has no right to give any sort of direction on the matter. The court remarked that the lower court passed the custody order with great care and caution, and agreed with the prosecution argument that the accused cannot dictate in what manner the probe has to be conducted.
In their plea, accused Mohammed Shafi (52), Bhagaval Singh (68) who is an Ayurvedic massage therapist, and his wife Laila (59), had also sought directive to the state police chief not to parade them and not to disclose their confession statements to the media and public until filing of the chargesheet. The accused had alleged that the investigating team had published wrong information to defame their dignity before the public at large, but the trial court had failed to consider these aspects in proper sense, which ultimately resulted in granting their custody to the police for 12 days. They had also alleged that it was a passion for certain investigating officers to disseminate to the media piecemeal or full information regarding the progress of the investigation.
A court here on October 13 had granted Kerala police the custody of the three accused in the case for detailed interrogation. In the custody application, the police had stated that the accused needed to be further interrogated to probe whether there was any other reason behind the women’s murders. The police said they also needed to investigate whether there were more victims to this horrific crime.
The chopped body parts of the deceased women were exhumed from the premises of the couple's house at Elanthoor village in Pathanamthitta district on October 11. The first woman had gone missing on September 26, and the investigation to find her had led the police to Shafi. On interrogating him further, the police found that the trio had earlier murdered another woman in a similar manner in June this year.
Watch: Nayanthara and Vignesh Shivan may not have broken the surrogacy law