Ending a 40 day-long protest that kept the authorities on their toes, the body of P.P. Mathai, a 41-year-old farmer from Chittar was finally laid to rest at the St. Mary’s Orthodox church cemetery here on Friday evening.
The body, kept in a morgue after a recent re-postmortem, was brought to his residence at Vadasserikkara in the morning. Notwithstanding the COVID-19-related guidelines, people turned up in huge numbers to pay their last respects to the deceased.
The body of Mathai was found in a well near his residence on July 28, hours after being taken into custody by the forest officials for allegedly damaging a camera-trap on the forest fringes. Following a post-mortem at the Government Medical College in Kottayam, it had since been kept at the morgue of a private hospital in Ranni.
While a special investigation team led by Chief Forest Conservator (Southern Circle) Sanjayan Kumar concluded the death as suicide, the victim’s family believed that justice had been denied to the farmer despite a police investigation.
“Let alone arresting the accused, the police did not even bother to interrogate them. Right from the beginning, they appeared to be under severe pressure to drag the investigation,” said Jacob Varghese, a relative.
Mr. Varghese also exuded confidence over the re-investigation being carried out by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) . “The inquest, which was held in the presence of relatives prior to the re-post-mortem, unearthed at least seven injuries that had not been recorded earlier,” he claimed.
The body was subjected to re-post mortem at the Pathanamthitta General Hospital on September 4. Following this, a team of officials from the CBI also visited the crime scene and collected statements from the victim’s relatives and other witnesses.
The case was handed over to the Central agency after the victim’s relatives approached the Kerala High Court. Though the police, which filed a primary report with the Judicial First Class Magistrate Court in Ranni, had unearthed as many as 12 lapses from the part of the forest officials, it never arraigned anyone as accused.
Despite repeated requests by the Pathanamthitta district administration and the police, the victim’s family had insisted on burying the body only after arresting the culprits. The non-burial had been a sore point with the authorities as various organisations, from the farmers to the Church and the mainstream political parties including the Congress and the Kerala Congress factions, staged a series of protests seeking justice.
