An accused in multiple cases— ranging from Sandalwood theft, murder threats, murder attempts to even hacking a cop. However, attempts to put him behind bars remained unsuccessful.
Witnesses would turn hostile, political influence from different parties at different times would let him go scot free, and even his skilful escapes made him tough to pin down.
Jambulingam Suresh was a headache for police officers in Balaramapuram and Neyyattinkara in the 2000s.
He had mastered the art of being invisible in plain sight and had an unbothered attitude if he had to attack someone obstructing his plan.
“We don’t know how he does it. But he can run at unbelievable speed, climb trees in a short span, hide inside trenches which appear as normal grassland or agricultural land for others, or even tactfully slip into the tall grasses and hide till the cops get tired- like some superpower to hide,” says a police officer.
“He even stayed in tree houses. Sometimes on the terraces of empty homes in the locality during the daylight without getting caught. He came down only in the dark.”
He was always a slippery fish to catch, the police officer adds.
When the police looked up towards the tree branches, he waited patiently in between tall grass, or escaped by jumping across rooftops.
A few other tricks he used to flee was by applying soot all over his body to camouflage at night, and oiling himself up to ease his escape if caught.
The police had to wait till 2014 to lock him down in a case.
Upon receiving a tip-off that Suresh might attack two people who refused to alter their statements against him in the court, the Neyyattinkara police tried to reach the place where he was supposed to show up based on the tip-off.
Suresh hacked one of the witnesses, he tried to escape from the scene as soon as he saw the police officers.
Running behind him for hundreds of metres, the police caught two of his accomplices.
However, when they were about to catch him, Suresh hacked the then-Neyyattinkara circle inspector, Anil Kumar, on the head and fled the scene.
After nearly one week of treatment, Anil Kumar got better. C John, who replaced him, nabbed Suresh a few days later.
“Unlike the common notion of officers feeling afraid of attacks, my team was enthusiastic and determined to catch him. But people still feared Suresh. He also does not use phones to communicate. From what I remember, he was hiding on the terrace of a building when we traced him in the Balaramapuram locality itself,” John recalls.
His arrest was recorded within a month of his attack on Anil Kumar.
In what remains a mystery, the person who was hacked on the same day backtracked from the case.
With the arrest, police and natives hoped it marked the end of the ‘Jambulingam phenomenon’ in the premises.
The locals did not have to fear Suresh or any of his accomplices’ threats anymore.
But Suresh came back after a 12-year break, with the same crimes and mode of operation.
The recent case, for which Suresh has been remanded, is for an alleged attack against a woman and her daughter on August 20.
Police officers who were juniors back then still remember how this man was always an intriguing news topic.
This time, the news of him jumping from the second floor of a building and trying to escape has brought his antics back in talks.
The police, however, had cordoned off a two-kilometre radius and teamed up with multiple parties to nab him successfully.
All this has made everyone who is aware of his actions ask the same question: how is he doing all this, even after all these years?