Three years and many political storms later, nine men accused in the sensational Kanichukulangara highway killings were pronounced guilty by the Alappuzha district court on Thursday. Their sentences will be handed down on Saturday but the murders exposed the dark underbelly of the state’s chit funds scene.

The case goes back to July 2005 when an old truck hurtling down the Kochi-Alappuzha highway suddenly veered right and crashed into a Tata Safari coming from the other direction at Kanichukulangara, killing three occupants on the spot—Ramesh, a chit fund operator, his sister-in-law and his driver.

What was initially thought to be a freak accident soon turned out to be something straight from a B-grade flick. The dead Ramesh had fallen out with his employers, the Himalayan group, and launched another outfit to take on his former bosses. The Himalayan group’s bosses—two school dropouts with a criminal history—allegedly decided to do away with the competition. Their outfit had grown miraculously from a one-room operation to 58 state-wide branches with over 10,000 employees, all in less than seven years.

The outfit hired an old truck for the job and two of them lay in wait for Ramesh on the highway. Another thug reconnoitred the road, guiding the killer truck on his mobile phone as it approached. Only one man in the car survived, and he is now paralysed.

Just when the cops thought they had cracked the case with witnesses, mobile phone call records and other back-ups, no less than 18 important eye witnesses to the conspiracy and its after events mysteriously turned hostile in court, amid allegations that a lot of money had changed hands. Then came a deluge of allegations by the accused men that politicians, including current KPCC chief and then Rajya Sabha MP Ramesh Chennithala, had wangled lakhs of rupees from them, promising to get them out.

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