THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Moving to the next round in the probe, the Special Investigation Team (SIT) investigating the Sabarimala gold missing case has allegedly taken into custody former Sabarimala administrative officer B Murari Babu, who is an accused in the case. He was taken into custody from his residence at Perunna and brought to Thiruvananthapuram.
Sources said he is currently being questioned at the Crime Branch office in Thiruvananthapuram and his arrest will be recorded soon. The SIT had already collected incriminating evidence against Murari and some other Devaswom Board officials who were arraigned in the case.
The SIT’s finding, sources said, was that some of the accused, including Murari and former Sabarimala executive officer D Sudheesh Kumar, had allegedly played a role in the subterfuge.
It was Murari who wrote to Sudheesh that the main accused, Unnikrishnan Potti, had volunteered to electroplate gold on the copper sheets of the dwarapalaka idols and on the sheets placed in the corners of the sanctum sanctorum.
This act of mentioning the gold-plated sheets as copper sheets, the SIT observed, was deliberate and done to facilitate the fraud. Sudheesh, sources said, is also under the scanner as he had recommended to the then Devaswom Board Commissioner to permit Unnikrishnan to plate gold on the sheets stripped off from the artefacts. Sudheesh too, in his communiqué, had recorded the sheets as copper, which allegedly suggests that the act was orchestrated.
The two officers had joined the board as employees before 1998, when the UB Group plated gold on the dwarapalaka idols, door frames and the roof of the sanctum sanctorum, and were aware that the sheets were electroplated with gold in a traditional manner. The Devaswom Vigilance Officer had also made adverse remarks against the duo in his report and wrote that they had consciously mentioned the gold-plated sheets as mere copper sheets. The vigilance officer had also suggested disciplinary action against them.
