Seventeen years after an engineering student’s decapitated body was found in a gunny bag near Kovalam, a Central Bureau Investigation (CBI) court in Thiruvananthapuram on Tuesday found the second accused — Mohammad Ali (58) — guilty of the murder.
First accused Durga Bahudur is still absconding and the central agency made several efforts to nab him but to no avail, official privy to the development said.
The quantum of punishment will be delivered on Wednesday.
Hailing from Andaman, Nicobar Islands, the deceased Syamol Mondal (21) was a final- year student at the government engineering college in the state capital. He was reported missing from his hostel on October 13, 2005 and after 11 days, his headless body was recovered on October 24, 2005. His missing body parts were recovered later.
According to the prosecution, Mondal’s father, Basudev Mondal, a senior government official in Nicobar had been funding accused Ali’s business for many years. Later they fell out and he withdrew his investment. Nursing a grudge, Ali decided to take revenge on Mondal.
He came to Thiruvananthapuram and hatched a conspiracy to do away with his son. He sought the help of a history-sheeter Durga Bahudur, a resident of Nepal, to kill him. Prosecution said that after the accused abducted Mondal, they made ransoms calls to his father seeking ₹20 lakh.
{{/usCountry}}He came to Thiruvananthapuram and hatched a conspiracy to do away with his son. He sought the help of a history-sheeter Durga Bahudur, a resident of Nepal, to kill him. Prosecution said that after the accused abducted Mondal, they made ransoms calls to his father seeking ₹20 lakh.
{{/usCountry}}A week after his abduction, the victim’s father came to Kerala and the ransom amount was fixed at ₹10 lakh.The accused asked him to come to Chennai to handover the amount. But his abductors escaped after they found that a police team was trailing the father. A few days later, Mondal’s body was recovered which was later identified by his father.
During investigation, police found that abductors had called from Mondal’s phone after removing its SIM card. Later, the phone was recovered from a second-hand mobile shop in Chennai and Ali was arrested from Nicobar. In 2008, the deceased’s father moved the high court which handed over the probe to the CBI. There were 52 witnesses in the case, out of which 12 later turned hostile, said an official privy to the matter. Ali had later confessed before the police that Mondal was suffocated to death on the second day after his abduction and he had planned to extract maximum money from the father.
The case in the matter was registered under Sections 302 (punishment for murder)of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) Sreekaryam police station in Thiruvananthapuram.