Five people, involved in the killing of an SDPI leader in Kerala recently, have been taken into custody, police said on Friday, 24 December. All the five were directly involved in killing the SDPI leader KS Shan, ADGP (Law and Order) Vijay Sakhare told PTI.
The police said the men in custody are RSS workers. V Sakhare is heading the Special Investigation Team (SIT) probing into the recent back-to-back murders of SDPI's Shan and BJP's OBC Morcha leader Ranjith Sreenivas.
The senior officer said the culprits who killed the BJP OBC Morcha leader have been identified and police teams have already gone to nab them. "We are working on that. They will also be caught," he said.
Shan, the State secretary of SDPI, was killed by a gang while he was on his way home in Alappuzha, while the BJP OBC Morcha state secretary Sreenivas was hacked to death in front of his family by some assailants in his house the next morning in the same district.
Sakhare had said as all those directly involved in the crime had managed to escape to another state, Kerala police has sought assistance from their counterparts in the neighbouring States to nab them. Not only those took part in the larger conspiracy of the murders but also those who provided the killers any kind of help would be booked for conspiracy, he said.
Sakhare told reporters in Alappuzha:
"We cannot divulge the details like in which States they are hiding. Wherever they go, we will chase and catch them. Cyber investigation has also been intensified in this regard."
Shan, the state secretary of the SDPI in Kerala, was attacked on Saturday, 18 December, at Mannancherry in the district while he was on his way home and his party alleged that the RSS was behind it. The SDPI leader was on his way home when a car rammed into his bike and as he fell down, the assailants assaulted him leading to his death, police said.
Shan succumbed to his injuries at a Kochi hospital around midnight, police said. On the day of Ranjith's murder, police had said they suspected that the attack on Ranjith was in retaliation to the killing of Shan.
(Published in arrangement with The News Minute)
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