The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Saturday began questioning several people in connection with the 1992 death of a Kerala nun, Sister Abhaya, five days after it announced a new team to probe the mysterious death.

Abhaya, an inmate of the Pious X hostel near Kottayam was found dead in the well of the convent in 1992. The CBI concluded in November 1996 that the death was a homicide but the murderer remained untraced. The state police had dismissed the case as suicide in 1992.

The new team on Saturday summoned key people both from the police and fire services who had fished out the body from the well.

Speaking to reporters after the questioning by the CBI, fire services official T P Rasheed, who had taken out the body, said the CBI officials had asked him to speak on all that he knew and saw.

“Like in the past, today also I said what I have been saying before, that when the body of Abhaya was taken out the undergarments were missing. I have done my job of telling the truth,” said Rasheed, who has retired.

On Friday, the team visited the convent where Abhaya had stayed and inspected her room.
The present CBI team is the fourth since 1993, when it first began investigating the case. On all the three earlier attempts the agency failed to resolve the mystery behind the nun’s death.

The new CBI team was appointed after Joe Mon Puthenpurackal, a social activist who formed the Abhaya Action Committee in 1992, met the CBI director in May and demanded a fresh probe.

Two other employees of the fire services were also summoned, along with Puthenpurackal.
Meanwhile, the then assistant sub-inspector of police, Augustine, who had prepared the first information report (FIR), was also summoned for questioning.

Reports indicate that in the FIR prepared by Augustine, the company name of the undergarments that Abhaya wore was mentioned when the body was taken out of the well.

As soon as the new CBI probe was announced in Delhi, Augustine, who has also retired from service, had approached the Kerala High Court seeking anticipatory bail, fearing arrest by the new CBI team.

The 15-year-old case came back into the limelight in April after a newspaper reported that Abhaya’s medical reports had been tampered with at the Chemical Examiners Laboratory in Thiruvananthapuram.

According to the report, the results of the vaginal swab were positive for semen and spermatozoa but were corrected using a whitener and rewritten as negative.

Last month, the Thiruvananthapuram Chief Judicial Magistrate had ordered that two women officials of the Chemical Examiners Laboratory be arrested, after a forensic report confirmed that tampering of records took place at the laboratory.

Ernakulam Chief Judicial Magistrate P D Sharangdharan had earlier this month expressed surprise over the CBI having no clue in the case even after 15 years.

He was also shocked that Sister Abhaya’s post mortem work register had gone missing from the Kottayam Medical College last month and ordered an enquiry into the matter.

Reports indicate that the CBI team would also shortly interrogate the two suspended lady government officials and also the doctors who did the post mortem.

The new team’s operations are reportedly directly being monitored by the CBI director from New Delhi.