Utthra’s husband was sentenced to double life imprisonment in the Anchal Uthra murder case. The sentence was handed down by Kollam Sixth Additional Sessions Judge M Manoj. The court on Monday found the accused guilty.
Uthra (25) was found dead in her house on May 7, 2020, at Anchal Eram Vellasseril’s house. Her husband Sooraj, 27, of Parakode, Adoor, was bitten by a snake to avoid his wife and take over her property.
The court ruled that the accused should be sentenced to double life imprisonment after the first ten years and then for seven years, and a fine of Rs 5 lakh was also imposed along with this.
The court identified him guilty of premeditated murder (section 302 of the Indian Penal Code), attempted murder (section 307), poisoning (section 328), and destruction of evidence (section 201).
Here is the first case of a person bitten by a snake in Kerala. Here is the first case in the history of the Kerala Police criminal investigation.
May 6th night, 2020, Uthra was bitten by a snake at his home, and he was found dead at 7 am. On March 3, 2020, a snake bite was reported at Sooraj’s house.
Despite the Special Branch report that Uthra’s death was a mystery, the local police did not investigate the matter.
The investigation reached a turning point after seeing Harishankar. Politicians and social media alike stood up for justice.
In a short period, the police and the police stood firm by filing a criminal complaint to show that truth and justice prevail over money and influence.
The dummy experiment was performed to understand the difference between a natural snake bite and a forced bite.
The cops also conducted the much-talked-about ‘dummy’ test to reconstruct the murder, where they brought in a cobra and placed it near a dummy to determine the nature of their bites and provide scientific evidence to back this case.
They examined various methods to see what made the cobra strike the figure, and once it did, the team studied the bite marks, measured them, and then compared them to Uthra’s wounds.
They concluded that there is a difference between a natural bite and a snake caught and a bite induced.
The post-mortem report of Uthra, the post-mortem report of the bitten snake, the chemical test results, and the forensic examination results of the mobile phones were also crucial in the case.
The trial in the case, which was filed on August 14 last year, was also expedited. Eighty-seven witnesses were examined, and two hundred eighty-eight documents and 40 affidavits were produced.
Sooraj bought the snake from Kalluvatukkal Chavarukavu Suresh, the snake catcher who was the first accused in the case, and later apologized.
On March 2, 2020, Uthra was bitten by a snake at Sooraj’s house in Adoor, and police found the same previous attempt. While undergoing treatment in a hospital that day, Sooraj prepared his next plan.
He was then bitten to death on May 7, 2020, by a cobra. The prosecution had told the court that Suraj had searched the internet for snakes several times before biting Uthra with a snake or a cobra.
While speaking to The News Minute, Hari Sankar, Superintendent at Kollam (Rural) and now the Inspector General at Kerala police headquarters recalled how difficult proving the crime was.
“We studied three-four similar cases – two cases that happened within a family and one that was a case of trying to kill a co-worker using a snake. We studied the judgments of these cases.
The incidents happened in Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh. In the judgments, the major fault cited was that murder couldn’t be proved,” he said.
The police then studied two cases – one in 2011 from Nagpur where a man was accused of killing his father and step-mother through a cobra and another in 2019 from Indore where a husband was accused of smothering his wife with a pillow and then trying to brush it off as a snakebite death.
For the Kerala police, it was not an easy job to prove their case. The team pored over previous cases and instances, where an accused had used a poisonous snake as a murder weapon. It was then they realized that most verdicts in such cases ended up in acquittals.
Speaking about the investigation in the case after the verdict, Kerala DGP Anil Kant said that the investigating team brought in experts from various fields, including snake catchers, to prove that Uthra died of a planned snakebite.
