Kannur ADM suicide: Kerala HC accepts wife’s plea seeking CBI probe

Kochi: The Kerala High Court on Wednesday accepted the petition of K. Manjusha for a CBI probe into the death of her husband, Kannur Additional District Magistrate Naveen Babu, who was found hanging at his official residence.

After a preliminary hearing, the court directed notices to be served to the Kerala government and the CBI.

It also directed the present probe official of the Kerala Police to submit the case diary and posted the case for hearing on December 6.

In the court, the counsel for Manjusha insisted that the only way for the truth to come out was a CBI probe.

Joining the issue was Leader of Opposition V.D. Satheesan who said that so far there has been no proper probe at all as people who should have been questioned have not been quizzed, even after a month has gone by.

“Despite requests from the family of Babu, who demanded that the post mortem should not be conducted at the state-run Kannur Medical College, it was done there and the inquest and the autopsy were done before Babu’s family arrived there. So everything is mysterious,” said Satheesan.

Incidentally, Babu was considered as one of the cleanest officials in the Revenue Department, which was even pointed out by Kerala Revenue Minister K. Rajan.

Babu was found dead in his official quarters on October 15, a day after he was given an official send-off from Kannur.

In her petition, his wife has raised concerns about the undue haste with which the inquest and autopsy were conducted before the family members arrived.

The sequence of events that led to Babu’s suicide began when, P.P. Divya, the Kannur district panchayat president and CPI-M leader arrived at the send-off function uninvited and made some critical remarks against Babu, alleging his involvement in corruption.

When this incident occurred, Kannur District Collector Arun Vijayan, who was presiding over the function, kept mum and did not make any statement when Divya walked out after making curt remarks against Babu.

Babu died by suicide the very next day on October 15 and following the furore, Divya resigned as Kannur district panchayat president.

She was on the run for several days after a case was filed against her on October 17.

On October 29 after a local court rejected her anticipatory bail, Divya was arrested by the police and lodged at a jail in Kannur till November 8 when she got bail.

In the alleged corruption remark, it later surfaced that one T.V. Prasanth, an electrician by profession who worked at the state-run Medical College at Kannur had applied for a petrol pump and Babu had delayed giving the No Objection Certificate for it. Prasanth and Divya’s husbands are colleagues at the hospital.

IANS