MADURAI: Former Union Minister M K Alagiri got a relief in ‘Pottu’ Suresh murder case as the names of his family members did not figure in the CB-CID charge- sheet filed on Thursday.
The chargesheet, filed before Madurai Judicial Magistrate court judge (incharge) Dhananjayan, names 18 accused, including prime accused and DMK’s former functionary V P Pandi alias ‘Attack’ Pandi.
The 60-page chargesheet comes with 117 witnesses and hundreds of supportive documents, said sources in the CB-CID.
The CB-CID sources said that investigation had revealed that Suresh, a close aide of Alagiri, had not allowed Pandi to maintain a cordial relationship with Alagiri and his family members. As his political career was destroyed, he was removed from a party post and that led to the murder.
After the DMK regime, Suresh had paid a ransom to Pandi’s relatives Thiruselvam, Mari, Thirumurugan and Arasapandi for murdering Pandi. Thiruselvam alerted Pandi about the plot. Pandi then decided to kill Suresh and he called his nephew Vijayapandi and his friends Santhanam, Arockya Prabhu, Mani and Mukesh to Chennai, where they hatched the plot to eliminate Suresh. Pandi’s henchmen monitored Suresh’s activities and they hacked him to death on January 31, 2012.
The CB-CID sources said that Pandi met Alagiri, his son Durai Dayanidhi and his brother-in-law Venkatesan at a star hotel in T Nagar, Chennai, before eliminating Suresh. Pandi had told them that his career was spoiled by Suresh. But they told him that they could sort out the issue. But Alagiri could not take action against Suresh and so Pandi went forward with the murder plan.
In the chargesheet, the CB-CID said that Pandi’s relative Thiruselvan had given the statement in Thirumangalam JM Court that Pandi killed Suresh over political rivalry.
Initially, Madurai City Police, which had handled the Suresh murder case before it was handed over to the CBCID, questioned Durai Dayanidhi’s close aide Ramakrishnan in January, 2012. This as an accused Santhanam had given a statement that Pandi had met Dayanidhi before the murder. However, the CB-CID probe revealed that there was no connection between those incidents.
All the 18 accused had either surrendered or had been arrested, including Pandi, who had gone into hiding for more than two-and-a-half years in Mumbai.
