KOCHI: The Munambam police didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary when they got a call on October 28 from the skipper of a fishing boat reporting that their co-worker, Alla, 30, a West Bengal native, had disappeared off the Munambam coast.
According to the complaint, Alla slipped and fell into the water while leaving the boat to go home after fishing, which had lasted a week. Within a few minutes of registering the man-missing case, the Munambam police informed the coastal police and started a search in the backwaters. But their hours-long effort to trace Alla ended in vain. As anticipated, his body washed ashore the very next day.
Station House Officer M Vishwambaran developed some doubt as he noticed a wound mark behind the head. That injury helped the police prove the case, which was on the verge of being written off as a normal death, was a murder. Alla’s fishermen friends from West Bengal, Ramprasad Das, 54, and Panu Das, 41, were later arrested for his murder. Four people were also arrested for trying to conceal the murder.
“Initially, we thought it was a man-missing case,” said SHO Vishwambaran. “Since the undercurrent was heavy in the area, it was difficult for a person to escape. However, we searched the whole night to find the person. But things changed when I noticed the wound mark. For this, someone had to hit him or his head had to smash on something.”
With that, the Munambam police decided to interrogate all seven people who were in the boat when he reportedly went missing. “When we started questioning them, they made contradictory statements. While a few said he fell down from the boat while returning from fishing, a few others said he slipped and fell into the water during fishing. That helped us reach the conclusion that they were trying to hide something. Then we questioned each one separately. With that, we understood that it was a murder and not an accident,” the inspector said.
The SHO’s probe team found that an argument with the victim over the daily allowance of `500 resulted in two of his colleagues thrashing him and pushing him off the boat. “Ram Prasad Das beat him up while Panu Das pushed him, and in the impact, his head smashed on the sharp iron portion of the adjacent boat. However, they didn’t try to rescue him and attempted to turn it into a missing case,” the officer said. Ernakulam SP Vivek Kumar gave the SHO key directions during the probe.
Meanwhile, the police probe based on the victim’s mobile also found that he migrated to the country illegally from Bangladesh. Even his wife expressed her difficulty in accepting the body for last rites. “We identified a few of his relatives settled in Bengaluru and brought them to identify the body. We also showed the body to his wife through a video call before performing the last rites,” Vishwambaran said.