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Shaju Philip
19 December, 2008

Thiruvananthapuram: The Port Blair District and Sessions Court on Thursday acquitted K C Sureshkumar, former assistant director with the Intelligence Bureau in Andaman and Nicobar, in the murder of advocate T Vasantha. While delivering the verdict, Judge Mir Dera Sheko said the CBI could not prove its charges against the accused.

Subsequently, 50-year-old Sureshkumar, who has been languishing in a Port Blair jail for nearly two years, was released on Thursday. Earlier, his bail applications were turn down by the sessions court in Port Blair, the Kolkata High Court and the Supreme Court, one after another. His plea to transfer the case out of the Andamans was also rejected.

He had served in the Andamans from 1998 to 2004 and was the CISF commandant at Kochi airport when the CBI arrested him on March 7, 2007. The daughter of a Communist leader in the Andamans, Vasantha, 30, was found dead in her flat on December 1, 2003. She had sustained a stab injury on her neck.

Vasantha, who was estranged from her husband, had been a casual informer with the IB. A human rights activist, she had appeared for arrested foreign nationals suspected to be members of Myanmar’s military Junta in the controversial Operation Leech of the Indian Army in February 1998. The CBI had been probing the case, considering the possible international ramifications of the operation.

The case was first investigated by the Andaman and Nicobar Police. As the probe failed to make any headway, the legal fraternity in Port Blair exerted pressure on the Government to hand over the case to CBI. Though the local police never doubted Sureshkumar, the CBI kept him under the cloud of suspicion. As part of the investigation, CBI several times summoned Sureshkumar to Port Blair. He was subjected to narco-analysis test and brain mapping, among other tests.

Later, the case assumed another twist when CBI investigating officer SP A K Sahay was arrested by his own agency on charges of corruption. As he was put behind the bars in the Andamans, the Kolkata High Court asked the sessions court this August to complete the trail within four months. Sureshkumar faced another ordeal when the legal fraternity in Port Blair refused to appear for him as the victim was one among them. He had to get lawyers from Chennai to argue his case.

“The CBI had falsely implicated me in the case. In my official capacity, I had reported the corrupt practices of CBI officials in the Andamans to the agency’s higher-ups. I have always clung on to the hope that truth would come out one day. As I had no role in the murder case, I had fully cooperated with the CBI,” Sureshkumar told The Indian Express from Port Blair. When contacted, a senior CBI officer in New Delhi said, “We did our investigations to our best, but could not gather any substantial evidence.”

Source: http://www.indianexpress.com/news/Vasantha-murder:-IB-officer-acquitted/400199/