TIRUNELVELI: AIADMK’s coordinator O Panneerselvam and co-coordinator Edappadi K Palaniswami have given a new lease of political life to former minister ‘Agri’ SS Krishnamoorthy by granting him a Lok Sabha ticket to contest from Tiruvannamalai constituency. He was removed from the State cabinet by the government headed by Jayalalithaa in 2015 for his alleged involvement in the suicide of an engineer of agriculture department in Tirunelveli.
Though Krishnamoorthy was acquitted by the Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court in the case of abetting the suicide of S Muthukumarasamy, Assistant Executive Engineer of Agricultural Engineering department in Tirunelveli who ended his life by jumping in front of a speeding train in Tirunelveli, the appeal filed by the CB-CID against the acquittal in 2016 is pending before the Supreme Court.
CB-CID, in its appeal, listed Krishnamoorthy’s name as the main accused. Chief Engineer M Senthil and Personal Assistant T Poovaiya are the second and third accused respectively. CB-CID had claimed that Muthu-kumarasamy had committed suicide as he was unable to bear the torture of the accused who urged him to collect `1.75 lakh from each of the seven drivers appointed to the agriculture department.
According to the special leave petition filed by CB-CID, after the accused threatened Muthukumarasamy that they would not allow him to retire peacefully if he failed to collect the money and hand it over to them, he had withdrawn `6.14 lakh from his Provident Fund and tried to borrow `5 lakh from his friend.
Muthukumarasamy’s death sparked a political row and Krishnamoorthy was removed from the State cabinet and party post of Tiruvannamalai south district secretary in 2015 by Jayalalithaa. He had to spend a few days in jail. However, he was reinstated in AIADMK in 2018 after Panneerselvam and Palaniswami took over the party’s leadership.