One more witness in the Koodathayi serial murder case turned hostile during his deposition before the Special Additional Sessions Court (Marad cases) on Monday.
C. Vijayakumar, district leader of a lawyers’ union owing allegiance to the Communist party of India (Marxist) [CPI(M)], testified before judge S.R. Syamlal that he did not see any original document related to the property transactions allegedly carried out by Jolly Joseph, the first accused in the case, to grab the property of her husband’s family.
Mr. Vijayakumar, the 156th witness in the case, also testified before the court that he was unaware of any mahazar report or witness account presented by the police with a contradictory version in his name.
The first witness who turned hostile last week during the trial was also a CPI(M) leader named Praveen Kumar who headed the party’s Kattangal local committee. He had testified before court that he was not familiar with Jolly Joseph and the fourth accused, Manoj Kumar. He had also testified that he had made the previous statements based on the instructions of the police.
It was between 2002 and 2016 that the chain of suspected murders took place in Koodathayi village in Kozhikode. The first suspected victim was Jolly’s mother-in-law Annamma Thomas, 57, a retired teacher who died in 2002. Six years later, her father-in-law Tom Thomas, 66, died of a mysterious heart failure. In 2011, her husband Roy Thomas also died under suspicious circumstances.
Likewise, Annamma’s brother Mathew Manchadiyil was found dead in 2014. In 2016, Sily, wife of Shaju Zachariya, who is Roy’s cousin and Jolly’s second husband, and Sily’s one-year-old daughter Alphine died. On October 5, 2019, a special investigation team arrested Jolly along with two other partners in the crime. It was on March 7 that the examination of witnesses in the case commenced at the trial court.
