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“Sukumara Kurup is alive. The picture on screen was taken in 2023. Kerala Police, do not close the file on Sukumara Kurup.”
This was the startling announcement made by the anchor of Malayalam news channel 24 News on August 27, as bold straps flashing across the screen declared, “He is still alive.”
During the slow news cycle of Onam week, when other channels were airing pre-recorded interviews and festival-related content, 24 News came up with what it called an “international exclusive”.
The channel claimed it had traced Kurup, a man who has been on the run since January 1984 after the murder of film representative NJ Chacko. For more than four decades, Kerala has remained fascinated by Kurup, one of the country’s longest-absconding fugitives. Perhaps the fascination stems from the nature of the crime itself, something virtually unheard of at the time. Kurup faked his own death to fraudulently claim an insurance payout and, in his place, left the charred body of Chacko.
At least three Malayalam films have been made about him, while news organisations have kept the story alive by reporting alleged sightings from different parts of the world.
This time, however, 24 News was not merely reporting another sighting. It presented a photograph of a man in Brunei, identified him as Kurup, and said it had traced the fugitive to the small Asian country.
But the “international exclusive” soon began to unravel.
Anjuraj, a Thrissur-based reporter with rival channel Asianet News, tracked down the family of the man whose passport was featured on 24 News and who had been identified as Sukumara Kurup. The family said the man in the photograph was not Kurup, but Damodaran Menon, a native of Thrissur who had left India in the late 1990s. Damodaran had converted to Christianity, and taken the name John Menon.
The news cycle quickly descended into competing narratives. While 24 News continued to insist that the man was indeed Sukumara Kurup, other channels lined up Menon’s family, government sources, and police officials to dispute the claim.
As TNM began trying to piece together how the story had reached the news channels in the first place, another detail emerged. The “tip-off” that Kurup was living in Brunei had been given to at least two other news channels. Both chose not to run with it.
The episode raised a larger question: how does a news channel verify an extraordinary allegation before airing it as an “international exclusive” especially amid claims that phones had been illegally accessed to obtain some of the information?
TNM has also learnt that the channel’s sources had visited Menon and recorded videos in which he refuted he was Sukumara Kurup. This visit was during the time when the channel broke the story. It is unclear why these videos of the denial weren’t used.
We spoke to editors at four news channels, Menon’s son who currently lives in Malaysia, and a Hyderabad native in Brunei with whom Menon is currently staying. The son confirmed that the man shown by 24 News as Sukumara Kurup was his father, John Menon alias Damodaran Menon. Furious over the news reports, he said he would like to make those responsible “taste a boot for breakfast”.
We sent a detailed questionnaire to 24 News’ editor Sreekandan Nair. Though we did not get a reply at the time of publishing, two editors of the channel who spoke to us anonymously claimed that they had not abandoned the story and were trying to gather more proof.
Chasing Kurup
On August 28, a day after 24 News broke the story, the executive editor of another Malayalam news channel received a call from a friend, who put him on a conference call with a man from Brunei. The man told the editor that people in Brunei used to make fun of John Menon by calling him Sukumara Kurup because he was reluctant to pose for photographs. The man also said that, many years ago, he had mentioned the rumour to a senior police officer who was a friend of his.
When TNM contacted the police officer, he confirmed that the information had indeed reached him. But the lead was dropped after the police found that Menon and Kurup did not match in height. This was at a time when the police routinely received calls claiming that Kurup had been spotted somewhere.
“There was another claim around the same time that Kurup had converted to Islam and was living in Saudi Arabia. That turned out to be false too,” the police officer said.