PONDA: After the PSI of Colva has been transferred following the accusation that he allegedly brutally beat up a couple, are South Goa police shaming themselves with the alleged custodial death of a labourer? Three cops were suspended for the alleged custodial death of Bihari labourer Kanhaiyakumar Mondal and for trying to show it as accidental death. On Saturday, Ponda Police registered an offence of murder of under Section 103 BNS read with sec 100, against unknown persons, according to SP South Goa Sunita Sawant.
Post-midnight on June 25, Maina Curtorim police station received a call from the State police control room stating that a person was found dead on the main road. He was run over by a truck that went without stopping. The initial investigation was pointing toward a hit-and-run case as there was no mention of the deceased in the diary of the Ponda police.
The Maina-Curtorim police arrested a truck driver in Karnataka on July 4 and brought him to the police station on July 5.
Soon the autopsy report revealed shocking and hidden details when the District Hospital at Margao conducted the post-mortem on the body.
The post-mortem report said that the deceased had four stab injuries on abdomen and one on the neck and he had died before the truck ran over him. This means someone had murdered him and left him on the road so that in the darkness of the night, a truck or any other vehicle would run over him and it would look like an accident.
After recovering the CCTV footage at Loutolim, the fingers were pointing towards the Ponda police that the deceased was dropped at the Borim junction in Ponda Police Station jurisdiction.
The police officers confessed to the investigating officer that they dropped the Bihar native labour at the site of the accident.
Superintendent of Police (South) Sunita Sawant has already suspended three policemen — Ravindra Naik (Head Constable), Ashwin Sawant (Constable) and Pritesh Prabhu (Driver, Constable) — attached to Ponda police station on Thursday.
