A 24-year-old RSS-ABVP activist was hacked to death at Kolayad near Pervaoor in Kerala's Kannur district on Friday evening.
Shyam Prasad, a student of the Government Industrial Training Institute (ITI) of Kakkayangad near Pervaoor, son of Raveendran and Shina of Alaparambu, was hacked to death by a gang of masked men near the Government Goat Farm at Kolayad at around 5.30 PM Friday. RSS leaders alleged that Red alliance was behind the murder.
Shyam was returning home from the ITI after the day’s classes on his two-wheeler when the gang of masked men, following him in a car, hacked him after hitting the bike near the goat farm on the Thalassery-Kottiyam road. A wounded Shyam Prasad tried to take refuge in a nearby house but the killers pursued him and brutally hacked him in the verandah of the house.
The killers fled the scene when a group of MNREGA workers present nearby raised noise.
Though Shyam Prasad was immediately taken to a hospital in Thalassery, he succumbed to his injuries on the way. Eyewitnesses said there were three masked men who attacked the RSS-ABVP activist.Hundreds of people including senior RSS-BJP leaders and workers gathered at the Taluk Hospital in Koothuparambu to where Shyam Prasad’s body was taken. local residents said that the area where the brutal murder took place on Friday was relatively calm compared to several other places in Kannur, infamous as Kerala’s Marxist heartland and political killing field.
According to local people in Kolayad, Shyam Prasad had not been involved in any incident of political violence before and there was no need for anyone to have enmity towards him. A member of the ABVP unit in the Government ITI at Kakkayangad, he was former president of the outfit’s unit at SN college, Kannur.
RSS-BJP leaders said that Shyam Prasad’s murder proved that “certain organizations” in Kannur were determined to continue with their policy of political violence even when the Sangh outfits had been fully cooperating with the efforts to restore peace in the violence-ravaged district.
The BJP called for a shutdown in Kannur district on Saturday to protest against the murder. “The killing of this youth is a telling example of the anti-Sangh programme of violence being pursued by Jihadi-Red terror alliance that is gaining strength in Kannur. They are on a campaign of murder against the Sangh,” said RSS leader C Sadanandan Master.
“Shyam Prasad, just an innocent student, was killed so brutally just when the RSS and BJP have been working to restore peace in Kannur. This tragic incident would not have taken place if the police had taken proper precautions,” district BJP president Sathyaprakash said.
The police have become a mere scarecrow under the CPI(M)led lDF rule,” district BJP president Sathyaprakash said.