Revisiting a 14-year-old murder mystery

SOME cases refuse to die. They sleep in dusty files, waiting for someone to flip them open. And sometimes, someone does.

- VARSHA SOMARAJ

Fourteen years after a body was pulled out of a temple pond in Nemom, the Crime Branch went back to that night in 1998 and began asking questions the local police had dared not to pursue.

The man who had died, S Suresh Kumar, a 28-year-old Indian Air Force non-commissioned officer, was first thought to have drowned. But his family believed otherwise and requested a crime branch probe.

It was April 2012 when the then Additional Director General of Police (Crimes), Vinson M Paul, reopened the file. His team had undertaken the challenge of digging into cases that had been long forgotten by routine policing.

"It became something of a mission to revive cold files. When the family requested a fresh probe, we took a hard look at the evidence or the lack of it," says Vinson.