Monday was a crucial day for the family of Kerala woman Uthra that had been waiting for justice for a year. And they were not disappointed as the Kollam court found her husband Sooraj guilty of killing her by using a cobra to bite her.
However, it was not an easy road for Kerala Police, which relied on not just previous cases but also a dummy snake to reconstruct the events.
The prosecution had argued that Sooraj, Uthra’s husband, killed her on May 7, 2020, using a cobra after drugging her. The incident happened at her house in Kollam. According to the prosecution, this was the second time Uthra was bitten by a snake as earlier she was attacked by a viper at Sooraj’s house.
Hari Sankar, then Superintendent at Kollam (Rural) and now the Inspector General at Kerala police headquarters, while speaking to The News Minute recalled how difficult proving the crime was. “We studied three-four similar cases — two cases that happened within a family and one that was a case of trying to kill a co-worker using a snake. We studied the judgments of these cases. The incidents happened in Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh. In the judgments, the major fault cited was that murder couldn’t be proved,” he said.
The police then studied two cases — one in 2011 from Nagpur where a man was accused of killing his father and step-mother through a cobra and another in 2019 from Indore where a husband was accused of smothering his wife with a pillow and then trying to brush it off as a snakebite death.
The cops also conducted the much-talked-about ‘dummy’ test to reconstruct the murder where they brought in a cobra and placed it near a dummy to determine the nature of their bites and provide scientific evidence to back their case.
They tried various methods to see what made the cobra strike the dummy and once it did, the team studied the bite marks, measured them, and then compared them to Uthra’s wounds. This is how they found out that there is a difference between a natural bite and when a snake is caught and a bite is induced.
Advocate G Mohan Raj, special public prosecutor, had argued that Uthra was differently abled and during marriage, dowry of about 98 sovereigns of gold, Rs 4 lakh and a car was given. Uthra’s father also used to give about Rs 8,000 every month. The prosecution case was that Sooraj wanted all these benefits and hence resorted to the crime. Sooraj was found guilty under IPC sections 302 (murder), 307 (attempt to murder), 328 and 201.
Sooraj and Uthra were married in 2018 and the couple have a son. According to prosecution, Sooraj started searching for vipers online from January 2020. On March 3, 2020, at around 1am Uthra suffered her first snake bite. According to prosecution, Sooraj tried delaying taking her to the hospital. “The bite happened around 1am, he called his friend to bring a vehicle to take her to the hospital only around 2.25am though there were two vehicles in his house. She was in the hospital for about 52 days. Sooraj stayed with her in the hospital but at the same time, he was searching for cobras in his mobile phone. Prior to her being bitten by viper in March, he was searching for viper,” the prosecution case said.
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