PATHANAMTHITTA: Elanthoor residents are still not able to believe that the popular massage therapist of their village and his wife allegedly killed two women as part of human sacrifice for financial prosperity.
Bhagaval Singh and his second wife Laila live in ward 13 of Elanthoor grama panchayat. Sobha was his first wife and they had a daughter. His 30-year-old daughter and her husband are now in Dubai working as nurses there and the couple has a child.
Bhagaval Singh divorced Sobha and married Laila 26 years ago. The couple has a 25-year-old son who works in Dubai. Bhagaval Singh and his wife have been popular in the village. The villagers called him Kadakampally Babu. Local residents and people from far-away places used to visit his treatment centre for massage therapy.
Many vehicles used to come to the compound and local people had no doubts about their activities. Neighbour Sreenivasan, 83, said he has not been able to believe that the couple could commit such a crime.
“Bhagaval and his father Vasu Vaidyan were famous massage therapists in the village. If we have any body pain or swelling, we would not go anywhere else. We recovered soon following his treatment,” he said.
69-year-old Sasikumari said the locality is called Puliprayathupadi. “When we visit other places and people there ask us about our whereabouts, we tell the name of Bhagaval Singh. Outside people could easily identify our location because Bhagaval was a famous figure of Elanthoor. When we hired an autorickshaw from Elanthoor town to come to our village, we mentioned about Bhagaval Singh’s locality and then the driver would drop us here,” said Sasikumari.
“Laila was friendly. Both of us used to go together everywhere,” said Grecy, a close neighbour. “We had seen the accused, Mohammed Shafi, many times in Bhagaval’s house. Whenever we saw him, he was on the phone. Since Bhagaval and his family were good neighbours, we didn’t have any doubt about them,” said another neighbour, Tinku.
Salafi group demands action from govt
KOZHIKODE: Wisdom Islamic Organisation, a Salafi group in Kerala, had approached the government many times seeking to enact a law to stop using religion for exploitation in the guise of black magic and sorcery.
Wisdom leader K Sajjad told TNIE that the organisation had launched several campaigns against superstitions as and when such instances come to public attention. “There was an instance at Karunagappally in Kollam in 2014 where a married woman was subjected to torture by a practitioner of black magic. The woman, who was the mother of two children, died in a hospital later,” he said.
Wisdom gave a detailed memorandum to Ramesh Chennithala, who was the then-home minister, when he came to attend a function of the organisation. “We had conducted a state-wide campaign against the ‘spiritual’ exploitation,” he said.
The organisation had stepped in when a mysterious incident happened in Perinthalmanna, Malappuram, in June 2017 where the body of a person had been kept inside a house for almost four months. It was said that the relatives continued praying for the dead to return as directed by a sorcerer. The body was later removed following the police intervention.
Similarly, a woman died of burns suffered during the rituals performed by a woman sorcerer at Purameri near Nadapuram, Kozhikode, in February 2017.