The Kerala Police on Saturday slapped murder charge on all the accused in the case pertaining to the shocking incident of lynching of tribal youth Madhu of Attapadi, Palakkad after the postmortem report effectively confirmed that he had been beaten to death. All the 16 accused have been arrested, the Palakkad district police chief said. The autopsy report said that Madhu’s death was caused by internal bleeding caused by a grave injury in the back of the head. It said that there were injury marks in the chest and that ribs had been broken, obviously due to the torture Madhu had undergone. It also said that there were signs of torture all over the body. Madhu (27), native of Kadukumanna tribal hamlet in the Attapadi Adivasi region, was beaten to death on Thursday afternoon by a mob of local people. They had committed the brutality, by accusing him of stealing food items, near a cave in a forest in the region where he had been living for the past five years. After torturing him for several hours by tying both his hands to his body using his own lungi in the forest, the mob made him walk to Mukkali Junction where they put him to public trial before handing him over to the police. After he vomited in their vehicle, the police took him to a health centre in Agali but he died before reaching there. After the autopsy report came out, the police slapped murder charge on the accused. The case the police had registered on Friday over the incident was for unnatural death. The shocking incident and the delay in arresting the culprits had triggered intense protests in the Adivasi region which went on till late Saturday evening. The Adivasis, who had blocked the ambulance carrying Madhu’s body at Mukkali as it arrived there after postmortem at the Medical College Hospital in Thrissur, withdrew from it only after they were convinced that all the accused had been arrested. The Congress-led UDF and BJP observed protest shutdown in Mannarkad constituency and taluk respectively on Saturday. The police have charged all the 16 accused with murder and under provisions of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act apart from under relevant sections of the IPC.