KOTTAYAM: The curious case of a missing man had a dramatic denouement when he literally came back from the ‘dead’. Joseph Melookunnel, the 74-year-old man who went missing from Taliparamba in Kannur after publishing his own obituary advertisement in newspapers on November 29, was finally traced from a Kottayam lodge on Tuesday.
It all started when Joseph approached the offices of some of the leading newspapers last week and gave an obituary advertisement announcing his own death. When a suspicious newspaper employee enquired about Joesph’s resemblance with the face of the deceased man, Joseph claimed that he was the younger brother of the ‘departed’.
Joseph’s relatives got the shock of their lives when they saw the advertisement the next morning. When they rang up his wife Marykutty to enquire about Joseph’s whereabouts, she revealed that he had gone missing. The same day, she lodged a complaint at the Taliparamba police station and an investigation was soon launched.Meanwhile, after visiting various places in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, Joseph arrived in Kottayam on Monday.
The same day, Joseph visited the Kottayam branch of the Agriculture Development Bank and demanded the bank officials to transfer his gold chain and a small amount of money to his wife. Though the bank manager said they could not perform any such transaction through the bank, Joseph insisted on the same. When the bank manager contacted the Taliparamba branch of the bank, he got the information about the missing case and soon intimated the incident to the local police. Later, the police located Joseph from a lodge in the town on Tuesday morning.According to Kottayam West circle inspector Nirmal Bose, Joseph told the police that he suffered from age-related ailments and did not want to be a burden to his family.