MAINA-CURTORIM: Investigations have to reveal whether the death of 31-year-old Bihari labourer Kanhaiyakumar Mondal was an accidental, suicidal or a custodial death.
Superintendent of Police (South) Sunita Sawant has already suspended three policemen — Ravindra Naik (Head Constable), Ashwin Sawant (Constable) and Pritesh Prabhu (Driver, Constable) — attached to Ponda police station on Thursday.
These were the policemen who had released the now deceased Mondal at Loutolim, on the road leading towards the Verna Industrial Estate, on the fateful night.
These Ponda police personnel were the ones who had seen him last before his dead body was found on the road at Loutolim.
They are now caught in a storm of suspicions because new facts emerging in the case point to massive discrepancies between how the case was portrayed and what it is now turning out to be.
Here is the sequence
of events:
1) Ponda police kept quiet as hit-and-run case was registered on June 25
Post-midnight on June 25, Maina Curtorim police station received a call from the State police control room stating that a person was found dead on the main road. He was run over by a truck that went without stopping. The initial investigation was pointing toward a hit-and-run case as there was no mention of the deceased in the diary of the Ponda police.
The Maina-Curtorim police arrested a truck driver in Karnataka on July 4 and brought him to the police station on July 5.
2) Autopsy report revealed shocking and hidden details
The real twist in the story came when the District Hospital at Margao conducted the post-mortem on the body.
The report mentioned that there were injuries on the body with a ‘sharp weapon with damage to abdominal organs caused by a sharp cutting penetrating weapon in a person’.
The following observation changed the entire course of the investigation.
The forensic experts observed that there were ‘post-mortem motor vehicular run over type crushing injuries for entire trunk, abdomen, pelvis and upper one-third of the lower limb’.
In simple terms, the post-mortem report said that the deceased had four stab injuries on abdomen and one on the neck and he had died before the truck ran over him. This means someone had murdered him and left him on the road so that in the darkness of the night, a truck or any other vehicle would run over him and it would look like an accident. It should be noted that at night, the road from Loutolim to Verna is used by long-distance trucks from Ponda connecting to the National Highway
WHY WERE 3 STAB WOUNDS ON THE THROAT AND 4 ON THE STOMACH NOT NOTICED BY THE POLICE?
The incident happened on June 25. The Police did not disclose stab injuries on the deceased till the Forensic department released the autopsy report.
NO RECORD OF LOUTOLIM ‘DROP’ OR OF POLICE DETENTION
Why did the Police Control Room van of Ponda police station come all the way to drop Mondal, an accused in a case, in the middle of the night, with no mention of this in the station diary? Thus far, the Ponda police had not even revealed this activity nor mention why an accused, a resident of Ponda, was driven around and dropped off in a Maina-Curtorim jurisdiction area. The police had been hiding all of this from all official records.
“The three suspended police officials have stated that the deceased was dropped at the Borim junction in Ponda Police Station jurisdiction but only after the recovery of the CCTV footage at Loutolim. The police officers confessed to the investigating officer that they dropped the Bihar native labour at the site of the accident,” a police official informed.
The serious unanswered questions and the post-mortem report and the suspension of the three officials point to the clear, sinister and shocking role of the Ponda police in the death case, with foul play written all over it.