Kollam: Sooraj, a young man accused of murdering his wife, Uthra, by forcing a poisonous snake to bite her has been found guilty by the Additional Session Court-VI here.
The court noted the crime as a "rarest of the rare" one. The court will pronounce the quantum of punishment Wednesday.
Sooraj replied he has nothing to say when the judge asked if he has anything to state in respect of the specific charges.
Reacting to the court's decision, state police chief Anil Kant said this was one of the rarest cases in which the accused has been found guilty on the basis of circumstantial evidence. Hailing the police team which investigated the case, he said it was one of the shining examples of how scientifically and professionally a murder case was investigated and detected. "The case was a difficult one", he told reporters in Thiruvananthapuram.
He said the investigation team worked very hard analysing forensic medicine, fibre data, DNA of the animal and other evidences to crack the case.
The sensational, rarely heard crime, which came to be known as the Uthra murder case, was committed on May 7, 2020 at Sooraj's house at Anchal in Kerala's Kollam district.
The crime branch wing of the state police carried out a detailed probe and even used a dummy to recreate the incident. The cobra that had bitten Uthra was 150 centimetre long, and the bite by such a snake would cause only a 1.7 or 1.8 cm-deep puncture on the human body. Investigators, who conducted the dummy experiment, established that Sooraj had held the snake's hood against Uthra's body, causing the puncture to go as deep as 2.3 and 2.8 cms.
The prosecution produced 87 witnesses, 286 documentary evidence and 40 other evidence during the trial. The defence examined three witnesses, besides producing 24 documents and three compact discs.
Sooraj made the first attempt to get a snake to bite Uthra on February 29, 2020. During the second attempt on March 2, 2020, Uthra was bitten by a viper, and admitted to a hospital in Thiruvalla for 56 days. She was recovering at Eram, in Anchal, when she received the fatal snakebite on the night of May 6. She died the next day.
Suresh, a resident of Chavarukavu, Kalluvathukkal, turned approver in the case. He had sold the cobra to Sooraj.
Other related cases, domestic violence and one registered by the forest department against Sooraj and his parents are at the trial stage.