A special court dealing with the Protection of Children from
Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act here on Friday rejected a demand by the
Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) inquiring into the Walayar children’s death case for material objects recovered
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from the crime scene.
The CBI team had approached the court demanding the victims’ dress for a dummy experiment. But the court rejected the CBI demand, asking it to conduct the dummy experiment with the same kind of dress.
Speedy probeADVERTISEMENT
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CBI officers said that they would speed up the investigation. The investigating team had questioned the first and the second accused, Madhu and Shibu, in the Malampuzha jail recently.
It was on January 7, 2017, that a 13-year-old girl was found hanging in her house at Attappallam, near Walayar. On March 4 the same year, her nine-year-old sister was also found hanging in a similar situation in the same house. The general finding that the younger sister was too small to manage to hang herself from the rafter of the house raised many suspicions about the death. The younger sibling was the only witness to the death of the 13-year-old girl.
It was found in the postmortem report that both the children had been victims of sexual abuse.
As suspicions about the deaths of the children strengthened, the blame game too increased. The police team that investigated the deaths was accused of neglect and failure. Several officers investigated the case
at different points of time.
Although the police slapped several charges, the POCSO court set free the accused in the absence of solid evidence. The verdict was widely viewed as a failure of the prosecution.
Reinvestigation
The victims’ mother approached the Kerala High Court seeking a reinvestigation. A commission appointed by the government found that both the police and the prosecution were at fault in the case. The
High Court overturned the POCSO court’s verdict, and ordered a fresh investigation by the CBI early this year.