Suspects masked Latvianwoman’s murder as suicide

Police says they allowed the body to rot to destroy evidence

May 04, 2018 09:15 pm | Updated 09:15 pm IST - Thiruvananthapuram

Senior police investigators on Friday said that the two persons accused in the rape and murder of a Latvian tourist at a marshy backwater locality near Kovalam in mid-March had ‘‘staged a hanging’’ to mask her murder as a suicide.

They said forensic evidence collected from the scene of crime suggested that the accused had strung their victim with the vine of a climbing plant to misdirect any possible investigation.

The injuries found on the victim’s 40-day-old body indicated blunt force injury to the neck and homicidal hanging. They also allowed the body to rot to destroy evidence, officers said.

The considerable lapse of time between the murder and the discovery of the body had hobbled the investigation’s efforts to collect incriminating DNA evidence.

For one, elements and time had degraded the root of the “foreign” hair follicles found on the body making it difficult to conclusively establish their provenance.

Hence, officers said they had been forced to rely on what they described as a singularly strong train of circumstantial evidence to fix the crime on the accused.

They claimed that a witness stated that he had seen the woman wander off to the mostly isolated wooded wilderness, which was the exclusive haunt of the accused.

Both were local men in their late 20s with a criminal history of drug abuse and violence. Later, one of the suspects told him that the “guest” had returned. It was March 14, the day she had disappeared.

A trap fisher who went to check his snare in the estuary area said he alerted the accused of an overwhelming stench of “something dead.” But the youth “dismissed” it as a rotting Otter. Mobile phone analysis showed the recurrent presence of the men at the spot.

Investigators said they believed that they also had persuasive “negative evidence” in the case. For one, the youth stated that they had not noticed the rotting corpse in their private locale till a passer-by discovered it by chance. But, they recounted less important matters prior and after the crime. “Its akin to stating that you did not see the elephant in the room but had noticed the flower vase,” a top officer said.

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