Kerala: Ahead of trial, documents related to Abhimanyu murder case go missing from court
SFI leader Abhimanyu murder case: Ahead of the trial, several important documents have gone missing from Ernakulam Sessions Court. Abhimanyu was stabbed to death on July 2, 2018.
FollowKochi: In connection with the murder of SFI leader Abhimanyu M of Maharaja's College, important documents have gone missing from Ernakulam Sessions Court ahead of the trial. The missing documents include a 5,000-page charge sheet, post-mortem report and statements of witnesses and accused.
On July 2, 2018, Abhimanyu, a BSc Chemistry student at Maharaja's College in Ernakulam, was fatally stabbed. The perpetrators were allegedly activists associated with the now-banned Popular Front of India, its student wing Campus Front of India (CFI), and its political arm SDPI.
The Ernakulam District Principal Sessions Court notified the Kerala High Court of the situation on December 1, 2023. The Kerala High Court ordered the district court to recreate the lost records. In Abhimanyu's murder case, there has been an active allegation that the government and the police lacked sincerity from the very beginning. The weapon used to stab Abhimanyu is yet to be found.
The chargesheet, submitted by Assistant Commissioner of Police, Control Room (Kochi city) S T Sureshkumar, named 26 accused, 13 of them directly involved in the murder. As per advocates familiar with the case, the documents disappeared from the Principal Sessions Judge's Court before December and efforts to locate them have been unsuccessful.
The prosecution and the accused parties in the case received a notification from the Ernakulam District Principal Sessions Court recently alerting them to the missing documents and asking that they provide any objections they may have to the reconstruction of the missing documents. The absence of certain documents caused a delay in the case's progress, and the police anticipate that the defence will contest the legitimacy of such records in court.
