A court in Thiruvananthapuram on Thursday sentenced seven activists including State-level leaders of a Dalit outfit, Dalit Human Rights Movement (DHRM, to life imprisonment in the case pertaining to the gruesome murder of a 62-year-old man, Sivaprasad, while he was having a stroll early in the morning at Ayiroor, Varkala in Thiruvananthapuram district, in 2009.
Judge A Badarudheen of the Additional Sessions Court, Thiruvananthapuram also slapped a fine of Rs2,00,000 each on the seven Dalit activists. A sum of Rs6,00,000 from the fine should be given to the family of Sivaprasad and Rs2 lakh to another person, Asokan, a tea stall owner who also had come under the attack of the DHRM activists.
The police had charged the DHRM activists for murder, attempt to murder, conspiracy, destruction of evidences, etc. The court said the Prosecution had been able to prove most of the charges. The judge awarded the punishment separately to them on different charges but said sentence would run concurrently.
The convicts will have to undergo an additional imprisonment of one year each if they fail to pay the fine. The seven convicts who were sentenced to life imprisonment were DHRM’s State chairman VV Selvaraj, southern zone secretary Varkala Das and activists Jayachandran, Saji, Thoduve Sudhi, Varkala Sudhi, and Suni.
The judge had the other day pronounced the seven persons guilty in the case in which there were a total of 16 accused. The court had acquitted six other accused earlier for want of evidence. One of the accused had died before the start of the trial while two are still absconding. The Prosecution said it would appeal against the acquittal of the six accused.
Sivaprasad was hacked to death near the post office at Ayiroor, Varkala at around 5.15 AM on September 23, 2009 when he was on his routine morning walk. Though the seriously injured Sivaprasad was taken to the hospital life could not be saved. As per the post-mortem report, the deep hack wounds in the neck had caused Sivaprasad’s death.
Within half an hour of the attack on Sivaprasad, a three-man gang that came on a motorbike attacked Asokan (48) who was running a tea stall at Kurunnilakkode, some five kilometers away from Ayiroor. The gang had hacked Asokan in the neck but he managed to take shelter inside his house, adjacent to the tea stall.
According to the police, the DHRM activists had no enmity towards Sivaprasad or Asokan but they had perpetrated the crime in order to prove the might of the relatively new organisation. The incident had given the outfit the image of an extremist organisation but its leaders claimed that this was the result of a conspiracy hatched by certain political parties.