A Kerala court on Tuesday sentenced to death 15 members of the now-banned Popular Front of India (PFI) for the murder of a BJP leader, in what is being seen as the first such case in the state in which so many have been handed capital punishment at one go.
This is also the first case in Kerala in which all the accused have been sentenced to death.
The convicts were involved in the murder of BJP OBC state secretary Morcha Ranjith Sreenivas in front of his wife, mother and children at their home in Alappuzha on December 19, 2021. It was allegedly a retaliatory killing after suspected RSS and BJP workers fatally knocked down K.S. Shan, state secretary of PFI’s political arm Social Democratic Party of India, the previous day.
The tit-for-tat killings had rocked the southern Kerala town otherwise known for its pristine nature, backwaters and the annual snake boat race. The district authorities had to clamp down prohibitory orders in the town for about two days fearing violence.
Mavelikkara additional district sessions judge V.G. Sreedevi sentenced all 15 men to death by hanging, apart from various prison terms and penalties for several penal sections under which they were found guilty. The court had pronounced them guilty on January 20.
The 15 convicts are Nizam, Ajmal, Anoop, Mohammed Aslam, Abdul Kalam alias Salam, Abdul Kalam, Safaruddin, Munshad, Jazeeb Raja, Navaz, Sameer, Nazeer, Zakir Hussain, Shaji and Shernaz Ashraf.
After the court pronounced the quantum of punishment, public prosecutor Prathap G. Padikkal told reporters that even three of the 15 who were accused of being part of the conspiracy to kill Sreenivas were awarded the death sentence as the court found it “a rarest of rare case”.
“The court concluded that this case falls in the description of rarest of rare cases, which was why all of them have been sentenced to death,” said the prosecutor.
“The court accepted the prosecution’s argument that it was a rarest of rare case since the accused were a well-trained team that barged into a house one early morning and cruelly hacked to death the victim before defenceless women and children,” he noted.
The first eight accused directly participated in the hacking of Sreenivas, a professional lawyer who had also contested as a BJP candidate in the 2021 Assembly elections from Alappuzha. Four others waited at the gate on their bikes that were used as getaway vehicles, Padikkal said.
Cops accompany the accused to a court in Alappuzha on Tuesday. PTI picture
Asked whether he had faced any threats to dissuade him from doing his job during the trial, Padikkal said: “We’ll talk about that later.”
The victim’s wife, Lisha Ranjith, also a lawyer, said: “This is indeed a rarest of rare case. This cannot be dismissed as just another murder. It was me, (his) mother and our children who saw how they killed him,” she told reporters.
However, two years after filing the chargesheet, the Shan murder case has been dragging on and all the 13 accused have been granted bail. Amid criticism, the government had last week appointed P.P. Harris as the public prosecutor. Alappuzha sessions court is set to hear the case on February 2.
