The State police on Thursday escalated their efforts to track down the two absconding suspects in the case relating to the suspicious death of Jishnu Prannoy, a student of the Nehru College of Engineering, Pambadi.
They formed a special team under Additional Director General of Police, North Zone, Nitin Agarwal to apprehend college staff Praveen and Sakthivel.
State Police Chief (SPC) Loknath Behera announced a reward of Rs.1 lakh for information leading to the arrest of the wanted men. He also sought the help of his counterparts in other States to apprehend the absconders.
The SPC also committed the Special Investigation Support Team (SIST) to assist the “manhunt.”
The police were monitoring the Internet to detect the online presence of the "fugitives from law," if any. The associates and relatives of the accused are under plainclothes surveillance.
The unusual pooling of sizeable intelligence and law enforcement resources to catch the absconders seemed to have been impelled by the highly emotive and widely publicised protest staged by E.S. Mahija, Jishnu’s mother, in front of the Police Headquarters on Wednesday.
Jishnu was found dead hanging in his college hostel room. Circumstantial evidence pointed to suicidal hanging. The probe headed by SP Kiran Narayanan is focussed on whether the suspects in the case had driven Jishnu to commit suicide.
Jishnu’s family believes that their ward’s “murder” was made to appear like a suicidal hanging by the perpetrators. They suspect that the college management habitually harassed students who they deemed trouble-makers and torture used.
Meanwhile, a magistrate court here denied bail to three of Mahija’s fellow protestors who were arrested on the suspicion of having assaulted police officers on duty and conspired to foment trouble in a notified security zone.
They are law student K.M. Shajahan, SUCI members Shajir Khan, Sreekumar and S. Mini and self-styled spiritualist Himavel Bhadranananda.
The police also cleared law enforcers who prevented Ms. Mahija from staging a sit-in in front of the police headquarters of any wrongdoing.
