62 get life term for Marad killings

A Kerala court today sentenced 62 people to life imprisonment for the 2003 murders of eight people in the coastal village of Marad.

A Kerala court on Thursday sentenced 62 people to life imprisonment for the 2003 murders of eight people in the coastal village of Marad.

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Additional Sessions Judge (Special Court) Babu Mathew P. Joseph also sentenced one person -- Abdul Latheef -- to six years imprisonment for misusing a mosque. The guilty verdict against the 63 had come in December, when 76 people charged in the case where acquitted.

The judge, however, agreed to treat the years that the culprits had spent in jail as part of the sentence. With Latheef already having spent six years in jail, he can walk free.

Marad had been seeing communal tensions before the massacre of eight fisherfolk on May 2, 2003. Earlier, six people had been killed in attack in 2002.

The Kerala government had last month asked the central government to launch a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) probe into the Marad massacres of 2002 and 2003.