“Blowing the furnace, in the company of a work knife, hunched body...’’ were the lines that 66-year-old Bhagaval Singh, a resident of Elanthoor grama panchayat in Pathanamthitta, posted on his social media page for the last time. Written on October 6, these lines incidentally marked the culmination of a long story involving greed and violence.
The sordid killings of two women as ‘human sacrifice’ have now made the names of Singh, a massage therapist by profession and a poet by passion, and that of his wife, Laila, grisly infamous.
Residents of Elanthoor maintain that they suspected the couple were performing some witchcraft rituals. “Strangers had been frequenting their house at late nights and we knew that they were performing some rituals on their backyard. The details, however, were not known as their house is located in the middle of a huge, isolated property and we had no access to it,’’ said a person who lives in the neighbourhood.
