Fugitive’s stay at MLA hostel triggers political storm

The “disclosure” by a television channel that a former Congress legislator had booked a wanted man in at the MLA hostel here caused a stormy political controversy in the capital on Friday.

The accusation was that Sarathchandra Prasad had reserved a room for one Jayachandran, an alleged blackmailer on the run from the law in Kochi.

Mr. Prasad has since clarified that he had booked the room for one “Sunil Kottarakara” and Jayachandran, who is alleged to have stayed at the legislator’s hostel for a week, was not known to him.

Left Democratic Front (LDF) legislators and BJP workers took separate marches to the hostel, accusing the ruling front of misusing legislative privilege to shield criminals.

Leader of the Opposition V.S. Achuthanandan demanded an inquiry. Speaker G. Karthikeyan said MLA hostel admission norms would be made more stringent.

Jayachandran was known in Kochi as an “event manager”. On July 11, the Kochi police booked him on the charge of using sex workers as lures to ensnare and blackmail moneyed businessmen and named him an absconder from law.

The blackmail came to light when two businessmen told the police early in July that two women had solicited them, slyly video-recorded their private meetings, and later demanded Rs.3 crore to not to make the recordings public.

A “local journalist in a senior position” had acted as the go-between.

Investigators recorded the telephonic conversations between the alleged blackmailers and the complainants. They found that the blackmailers had used voice-changer software to mask their true tone. The police trapped the women into accepting the payment and arrested them.

They put Jayachandran under surveillance, sought the Speaker’s permission to check the MLA hostel for the suspect and, subsequently, arrested him at Parassala when he attempted to flee to Tamil Nadu.

The investigators said the case had offered them a rare glimpse into the darker side of the sex-for-money business. Similar blackmail schemes, only a fraction of which were reported to the police, had resulted in suicides and destruction of livelihood and families, they said.