In a significant development relating to Kerala’s 22-year-old sensational case pertaining to the murder of Catholic nun Sr Abhaya, a court in Thiruvananthapuram on Friday acquitted the two forensic chemical examiners accused of tampering with the entries in the work register of the analyses of the murdered nun’s internal organs.
The court acquitted R Geetha, former chief chemical examiner of the Forensic Sciences laboratory, Thiruvananthapuram, and chemical analyst M Chithra giving them the benefit of doubt as the petitioner, rights activist Jomon Puthenpurakkal, was not able to prove any bad intentions in the act of tampering with the entries or the alleged conspiracy behind it.
The initial entries in the work register of the results of analysis of Sr Abhaya’s internal organs had confirmed the presence of semen with the word ‘positive’. However, these entries were later erased using blade and eraser and a new remark, ‘negative’, was entered to mean that no traces of semen were found.
Delivering the judgement, the Chief Judicial Magistrate Court pointed out that the entries in the work register had been tampered. Those who made the entries in the book also had the authority to correct them but there had been procedural lapses on the part of the chemical examiners in making those corrections, it observed.
The court pointed out that the petitioner had not been able to prove that the accused chemical examiners had made the corrections in the work register with bad intention.
Also, he could not prove the alleged conspiracy behind the tampering. Therefore, the accused were being acquitted on the basis of benefit of doubt, the court said.
“This verdict is illegal. An appeal will be filed in the High Court,” said Jomon. “There had been procedural lapses in the case due to which they had got chances for additional arguments. Also, it is obvious that the accused had prior knowledge of what the judgement was going to be. That they had come to the court today with sweets was proof of this,” he added.
“We have been going through this painful case for the past seven years. Now truth has triumphed. We thank God, Judiciary and our lawyers. The court has been convinced of our innocence,” Geetha said. “The murder had taken place in 1992 but the complaint against us had come up only in 2007. There is mystery in this,” she said.
“We had admitted in the court that corrections were made to the entries in the work register,” Chithra said. “But it was not intentional. The first entry was made after the preliminary examination and the correction was made after the final results came out. The final test should have proved negative (for presence of semen),” she said.
Te judgment of the Thiruvananthapuram court finding no fault with the tampering of the work register is significant as far as the main case relating to the murder of Sr Abhaya, which has now been frozen, as it justifies the finding of the CBI, which investigated the murder, that the Catholic nun had not been subjected to sexual abuse before death.
Nineteen-year-old Sr Abhaya was found dead in the well in the compound of the St Pius X Convent in Kottayam, where she was an inmate, on the morning of March 27, 2002. The local police and Crime Branch probed the murder initially but it had only led to the destruction of crucial evidences.
later, a CBI team took over the investigation. It confirmed that the nun was murdered but failed to get proofs to nail anyone. Since then, four other CBI teams have investigated the nun’s murder. The agency in November 2008 arrested two senior priests and a senior nun of the Knanaya Catholic Church for murdering the nun.