The Madras High Court has directed the CBI to investigate the murder of V Jayaraman, a Pondicherry University staffer, allegedly connected to the answerpaper manipulation scam

that grabbed national attention recently.

Disposing the petition on Friday, Justice P R Shivakumar directed the central agency to probe the case,

after counsels representing both CBI and Puducherry Government expressed their agreement. The court noted that a related case —

the marksheet scam — was already being probed by the CBI.

Jayaraman is the third accused in the marksheet scam in which the marks of several hundred engineering and medical students were changed in return for money. However, he was murdered months before the case was registered by the CBI for exposing the scam.

According to the kin of the slain youth, powerful persons in the Union Territory were connected to the scam and ready to eliminate Jayaraman to cover up the trail. As he had accused some higher officials of the university having connection with the scam and a senior police official’s son being one of the beneficiary of corrected marks, Jayaraman’s mother Vethavalli had approached the High Court to transfer the case to the CBI.

After lying on the backburner for months, the case gained attention after Justice Regupathi revealed that the counsel of one of the accused in the mark tampering case had attempted to influence him using a certain Union Minister’s name. Though the judge later clarified that the minister in question was not directly connected to the case, the controversy brought the case out of the pending pile.