By our legal correspondent
Thrissur, Feb 02 (IVC) The Mavelikkara (Alappuzha) First Additional District and Sessions Court judge V G Sreedevi on January 30 awarded capital punishment to the all 15-accused in the sensational murder of Advocate Ranjith Sreenivasan on December 19, 2021.
According to prosecution, the accused had encroached the house of Sreenivasan , BJP’s tributary organization of Other Backward Classes Morcha State Secretary at Vellakinar (Alappuzha) on December 19, 2021 early morning and they hacked brutally to death Sreenivasan in the presence of his mother, wife and daughter.
According to legal experts here, it was perhaps the first time in the judicial history of the State that all the 15 accused in a murder case to award capital punishment at a stretch.
The prosecution submitted before the honorable court that the murder of Sreenivasn was a rarest of rare crime and the accused deserved the maximum punishment and judge readily agreed with the submissions of the prosecution and awarded capital punishment to all the accused.
The prosecution also submitted that all the accused were the activists of the now-proscribed Peoples Front of India (PFI) and Social Democratic Party of India (SDPI). The convicted are : Naisam, Sameer Salam, Ajmal, Abdul Kalam, Manshad, Abdul Kalam, Shaji alias Poovathil Shaji, Nazir, Sakir Hussain , Mohhammed Aslam, Anoop, Saffruddin Jaseeb R, Shernas Ashraf and Navas, the prosecution added. All the convicted hailed from Alappuzha.
The tenth accused Navaz could not be produced before the court, as he was undergoing treatment in the Government Medical College hospital at Thiruvanathapuram, the prosecution said.
The murder of Sreenivasan was considered trigger for the murder of SDPI’s State Secretary K S Shan . Shan , 38 years, was attacked by assailants at Kuppezham junction at Mannnchery on December 18, 2021.
The provocation for the murder of Shan was killing of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) worker nandukumar , 22 years by SDPI workers at Vayalar in Alappuzha on February 24, 2021.
Political murder and counter-murder was being practiced n Kerala for several years. Earlier, the Honorable trial court had awarded the capital punished to the accused five in the sensational murder of K T Jayakrishnan in Kannur some years ago.
Jayakrishnan a teacher and BJP’s Youth Morcha leader was done to death by the CPI(M) activists in the presence of classroom when he was taking class for the students. Though the High Court Kerala upheld the capital punishment to all the five accused, the Honorable Supreme Court of India on appeal commuted the punishment of one accused to rigorous life imprisonment and four others were acquitted in the absence of evidence..
The leading criminologists and sociologists were very anxious o f the intermittent political murder and counter-murder in the State .They attributed to the support of the political parties to the accused for the increasing number of murders in which youths were done to death. It is high time for all the political parties to stop violence and murder for the growth of their political parties. They said “ murder remains murder whatever may be the ideological veneer”.
