K.K. Rema, wife of the slain Revolutionary Marxist Party (RMP) leader T.P. Chandrasekharan, told the court here on Monday that she believed that the Communist Party of India (Marxist) had hired a gang to kill her husband after hatching a conspiracy.
Deposing before R. Narayana Pisharadi, Special Judge, Special Additional District and Sessions Court (Marad Cases), during the trial of the case, she said the CPI(M) leaders had hatred and enmity towards Chandrasekharan, and they wanted to take revenge on him after the party lost the election from the Vadakara Lok Sabha constituency in 2009 and the local body elections in 2010.
Her husband had told her a week before he was killed at Vallikkad on May 4, 2012, that the CPI(M) would do nothing without the knowledge of four of those accused — C.H. Ashokan and K.K. Krishnan, secretary and member, respectively, of its Onchiyam area committee; K.C. Ramachandran, member of the Kunnummakkara local committee; and P. Mohanan, member of the district secretariat.
She said an attempt had been made on Chandrasekharan two or three months before the murder when he was returning home from Orkatteri on a motorbike. He narrowly escaped then, though he was waylaid using a plastic wire tied across the road at Thottolithazha. She said a well-wisher had written to Chandrasekharan four or five months before the murder about a conspiracy to kill him. “He received a second letter, and when I saw his face suddenly turning nervous, I asked him about its contents. He said it was a threatening letter, and continued that if his former party decided to do something, it would execute the plan. He said that if something happened to him, our son and I should not lose heart,” Ms. Rema said.
She said the CPI (M) had hired goons to sabotage the election in Vadakara by attacking RMP activists. There was information that these goons had been lodged at the Kunnummakkara local committee office. So RMP activists picketed this office. Mohanan, who was the chief election agent of the CPI(M) candidate, P. Sathidevi, tried to help the goons get away in a car. He was reportedly manhandled and thereafter he became vengeful. Later, at a public meeting organised at Kunnummakkara, Mohanan threatened to finish off Chandrasekharan and his organisation.
In another instance, she said, her husband had informed her of a speech by another accused, Krishnan, stating that Chandrasekharan’s head and brain would be found strewn like a coconut flower on the road. This was the day when Ramachandran was accorded a reception after he came out on bail in connection with a case of attempting to kill an RMP worker, T.P. Balan, at Kunnummakkara.
