Narco test CDs of nun murder case found doctored

R Gopakumar, THIRUVANANTHAPURAM, DH News Service:

In a fresh twist to the 17-year-old Sister Abhaya murder case, the CDs of narco analysis tests conducted on the three accused in Bangalore which were presented in court have been found to have been tampered with.

It was on the direction of the Chief Judicial Magistrate Ernakulam that the CDs were examined by an expert panel of the Centre for Development of Imaging Technology C-DIT) here in the presence of lawyers. Sources said that the experts examined the original tapes of the narcoanalysis tests done on the three accused received from Central Forensic Sciences Lab, Bangalore and the CDs which were presented in the high court and CJM court. The CDs presented in the courts were found to have been edited unnecessarily and not as a normal procedure as the CFSL had claimed. The report would be presented  to the CJM court on Monday.

It may be recalled that Justice K Hema of Kerala High Court who granted bail to the accused, two priests and a nun, had held that “the CDs are not only edited but also manipulated. According to me, in all probabilities, those are edited and manipulated at the Forensic laboratory itself by the person and persons who were doing the analysis.’’ 

The judge had also raised suspicions about the then assistant director of CFSL, Dr S Malini who handled the narcoanalysis.

The case which was initially written off as suicide by the State police became a murder case when the seventh team of the CBI took over two years ago. In fact, it was after the CJM court hearing the case as well as the high court blasted the CBI for its perceived inefficiency that the investigating agency took a serious look at the case. However, with no material evidence in sight, the CBI has been struggling to build up circumstantial evidences to nail the culprits.

The CBI’s theory is that Sister Abhaya came down to the kitchen of the Pius Tenth Convent in Kottayam in the wee hours of March 27, 1992 and saw the three accused engaged in a sexual act.

“The accused on realising that she had seen something which she shouldn’t have seen got rid of her,’’  the CBI lawyer had said.