Abhaya murder case: CBI may book senior priest

The CBI, which thrice tried to close the case pleading it could not find the killer, only to have the court to throw the case back at it each time ordering re-investigation, submitted the findings of a narco analysis that it got done on a couple of male priests and two nuns who were reportedly connected to the nun’s death.

Sources say the narco test report, still under wraps at the Kerala High Court and the court of the Chief Judicial Magistrate trying the case, has one of the priests owning up that Abhaya was bludgeoned and thrown into the convent’s well in the morning hours. This was after she left her room to draw water from the well, and walked into a priest and a nun in the dark, in a situation not in keeping with priesthood.

Sister Abhaya was an 18-year-old nun belonging to the Catholic Diocese of Kottayam, staying at the church-run St Pius X convent there. Her body was found in the convent well on March 27, 1992 and there was no convincing explanation — the police promptly wrote it off as a suicide.

Amid allegations that powerful religious sections were trying to avert the embarrassment of an expose, the locals suspected foulplay and formed an Action Council demanding a proper probe. A series of agitations and petitions later, the state police ordered a Crime Branch probe, which too said she had killed herself. The Action Council, led by civil activist Jomon Puthenpurakkal, got the Kerala High Court to order a CBI probe into the nun’s death.

The first CBI team probing the death reported it as a suicide. The probe had too many holes and a second CBI team led by Dy SP Varghese P Thomas was sent to investigate, and reported that the nun was murdered. Pressure soon mounted on Thomas to backtrack, and he resigned from the CBI in a huff seven years before retirement, but after disclosing how the agency’s higher ups were allegedly pressuring him to report the nun’s killing as a suicide.

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