Varghese led the Spring Thunder campaign of Kerala’s fledgling Naxalite movement in the 1970s, when K Karunakaran was the state home minister. Varghese and his followers mostly operated in the Wayanad belt of north Malabar, annihilating “class enemies” and were alleged to have killed a couple of local landlords accused of oppressing workers.

The special team of the Kerala Police stalking Varghese announced his death on February 18, 1970. Claiming he was killed in an armed encounter in the Tirunelli forest of Wayanad, the cops got photographs of the slain Naxalite, with a country rifle near his body, printed in newspapers.

Though Naxalite and other activist bodies in the state raised a din and moved court alleging it was a staged killing, the case and its investigation dragged on for many years, until the 1990s. That was when Ramachandran Nair, a former head constable, declared that he had shot Varghese point blank on the orders of his superiors after the police nabbed and tortured him in custody.

Nair, who died a year ago, had confessed that he was making the revelation only to clear his own conscience, and was willing to take any punishment the court deemed fit for his crime. Nair said it was Lakshmana, then a DIG, who ordered him to shoot, threatening to kill Nair if he did not oblige. The CBI, which took over the investigations in the wake of Nair’s revelation, had filed the chargesheet with Nair as the first accused.

Vijayan, Lakshmana and a couple of other policemen, who are no more, were made the co-accused, but they managed get a stay on the proceedings. The case received a fillip after the high court recently pulled up the accused for trying to delay the case and scrapped the stay.