Saturday 3 January 2015

WHO KILLED THIS MAN - 1 (THE CURIOUS CASE OF THA KIRUTTINAN)

The effectiveness of a police system is always judged by its ability to solve crimes and bring the perpetrators to book. A crime of passion is relatively more difficult to solve unless there is a confession or an eyewitness. This is because the offenders, in such cases, rarely have a criminal record. But when it comes to planned, cold-blooded crimes, though the police are often led on a wild goose chase through the sheer meticulousness of the operation, the long arms of law inevitably catch up. The modus operandi used, the clues unwittingly left behind, the life and track record of the victims, telephone records, the statements of friends, relatives and associates, all inevitably point to the identity of the criminal. 

It is the ability of the Tamilnadu Police to use technology and intelligent investigative techniques to crack the toughest of cases that has led to its inevitable comparison with globally acclaimed agencies like the Scotland Yard.

But blotting this track record are some high profile, celebrity murders which, despite the lapse of several years, have defied solution.

Who killed these persons? Why? Will the killers ever be brought to book? Why are the Tamilnadu government and the investigative agencies (both state and Central) twiddling their thumbs on these cases? The people would like to know. 

In this series of blog posts, I have attempted to highlight the facts and circumstances relating to six "unsolved" celebrity murders and leave it to readers to judge the rest...


THA KIRUTTINAN – TURNING IN HIS GRAVE...

The year 2003. The AIADMK under J Jayalalithaa was in power in Tamilnadu. Pasumpon Tha Kiruttinan, Highways Minister in the earlier DMK regime was on May 20, 2003 hacked to death while on his morning walk near his residence in Madurai. During the investigations, family members of Kiruttinan revealed that the murder was the fall out of political rivalry. DMK supremo Karunanidhi’s son Azhagiri was behind the incident, they said, as Kiruttinan belonged to the Stalin faction of the DMK and was a stumbling block in Azhagiri’s advancement in the party.

The police conclusion was that on May 18, Azhagiri had planned to "eliminate" Kiruttinan. His associate, Essar Gobi (later to become a councillor in Madurai Corporation) was entrusted with the task of executing the murder. P M Mannan (later to become the Temple City's Deputy Mayor) was directed to render all assistance to him. On May 19, Mannan, Gobi, Mubaraq Manthiri and V Sivakumar @ "Karate" Siva met in a hotel on Town Hall Road to finalise the plot. Ibrahim Sulaiman Sait and Mubaraq Manthiri were fixed as assailants. Armed with the weapons provided by Gobi, the assailants stabbed Kiruttinan to death at around 6 AM.

The next day Azhagiri was arrested on charges of conspiring the murder. Mannan, Essar Gobi, Mubaraq Manthiri and "Karate" Siva were arrested a couple of days later, while Ibrahim Sulaiman Sait surrendered on May 27. Very soon charges were framed and trial got under way in the Madurai sessions court.

The year 2006. The DMK under Karunanidhi had come to power in Tamilnadu. Efforts were immediately initiated to get Azhagiri and friends freed from the case. M Muthuramalingam, an AIADMK functionary and one of the witnesses in the case, moved the Supreme Court of India alleging harassment by the police to change his testimony. Based on this petition, the Supreme Court ordered the trial to be shifted to Chittoor District Court in Andhra Pradesh. The apex court also directed that the entire records of the case in Tamil be translated into English and Telugu. Interestingly, these translations were not done by an official translator but was done at the instance of the accused themselves, by Mohammed Jinnah, a State-level office-bearer of the youth wing of the ruling DMK party. Further, various persons connected with the murder case, were conferred plum government posts. To cut a long story short, a systematic and calculated attempt was made at subverting the due process of law and undermining the sanctity of the orders passed by the apex court.

The year 2008. Karunanidhi was into his second year in office as the Chief Minister of Tamilnadu, and had every reason to feel happy. He had first made use of the media empire built up by his nephew, Kalanidhi Maran to win power. He then made use of another nephew, Dayanidhi Maran, who knew English and Hindi, to consolidate his position in Delhi. Thereafter he discarded both his nephews and instead positioned his daughter Kanimozhi as a Member of Parliament. He went about assiduously grooming his son Stalin to be his political successor, while his wives, Dayalu and Rajathi built a financial base which would put the Ambanis to shame! His grand children and sundry relatives by now owned TV channels, furniture showrooms, real estate ventures, gaming centres, film production houses, you name it...

The only sore point in Karunanidhi’s happiness at that point of time was his son Azhagiri, who stood charged with the murder of one-time DMK minister Tha Kiruttinan. But days before he completed his second year in office, Karunanidhi made sure that this matter was also solved to his complete satisfaction and paved the way for Azhagiri’s elevation as Union Minister for Chemicals and Fertilizers in 2009.

M K Azhagiri and 12 others, who were charged with having conspired and murdered Tha Kiruttinan, were acquitted by the court in Chittoor in May 2008 (he became Union Minister in 2009). In the course of the trial, 81 of the 82 witnesses, including Kiruttinan’s brother Ramiah, turned hostile. (Ramiah later joined the AIADMK and claimed that he had been under threat of his life to change his testimony.) The only witness who testified against Azhagiri was Muthuramalingam, who had got the case transferred to Chittoor in the first place. The prosecution (read the State under Azhagiri’s father, Karunanidhi) pushed a weak case. As a result, even Ibrahim Sait and Mubaraq Manthiri, who were alleged to have actually executed the killing, and who had filed confessional statements, were exonerated.

No appeal was madein the case, which was conveniently closed by the state police. It was only in September 2013, after a gap of five years, when the AIADMK under Jayalalithaa returned to power that a leave petition was filed in the Supreme Court by the state, challenging the order of the Chittoor court. However, this petition was quashed by the Supreme Court, which ruled that the state of Tamilnadu had no locus standi in the case as it had been transferred to another state and that only the government of Andhra Pradesh could appeal against the lower court judgement. The Government of Andhra Pradesh couldn’t care less.


Tha Kiruttinan must have turned in his grave. 

There the case rests, more than a decade later. If Azhagiri and friends did not kill Kiruttinan, then who did? Who will answer this question -- the government of Tamilnadu, the government of Andhra Pradesh, the Supreme Court of India???


1 comment:

  1. Kiruttinan is one thing.

    There is another.

    Since all the accused in the Shankararaman case have been acquitted, who killed the Varadarajaperumal Temple manager in 2004?

    How about saying that Kiruttinan and Shankararaman committed a weird form of Hara Kiri?

    ReplyDelete