Thiruvananthapuram: A court in the Alappuzha district of Kerala on Saturday found 15 accused guilty in the brutal murder of BJP OBC morcha state secretary chief Ranjeet Sreenivasan in December 2021.
Mavelikkara Additional Sessions Judge V G Sreedevi pronounced the judgement. All the 15 accused who faced trial in the case were found guilty. Murder charges were also framed against the 15 accused.
The accused 1 to 8 were directly involved in the murder of the BJP leader, while 9 to 12 waited outside the house to provide logistic support to the killers and facilitate their exit from the spot after the crime. The court found that 13 to 15 hatched the conspiracy.
The prosecution whose hearing got over on Saturday, sought maximum punishment for the accused since they have been found guilty of the heinous crime. The court will pronounce the quantum of punishment on Monday after hearing the arguments of the defence.
The accused; Naisam, Ajmal, Anoop , Mohammad Aslam, Abdul Kalam alias Salam, Abdul Kalam , Saffaruddin, Manshad, Jaseeb Raja, Navas, Sameer, Nazir, Abdul Kalam, Zakir Hussain, Shaji and Sernas Ashraf were found guilty of the crime. The accused number one to eight who were directly involved in the murder was convicted under section 302. All the accused are members of the now-banned Popular Front of India (PFI) and its political outfit Social Democratic Party of India (SDPI).
Ranjeet Sreenivasan was brutally hacked to death at his residence in Alappuzha on December 19, 2021 in front of his mother and daughter.
The prosecution informed the court that the conspiracy to murder RSS leader Ranjeet Sreenivasan was hatched in three phases. After the killing of an RSS worker Nandu Krishna in Vayalar, the SDPI assailants had anticipated retaliatory killing by the rivals. They decided in advance to kill a person from the opposite camp should there be a retaliatory action.
The second conspiracy was hatched on December 18, 2021, following the killing of PFI activist Shaan in Mannancherry. While discussing the retaliation plan, the assailants decided to eliminate Ranjeet. The prosecution said that at the same midnight, the accused assembled at Alappuzha railway station road took a round of Ranjeet’s house and returned.
The very next day, the assailants reached the house at 6 am and brutally hacked Ranjeet to death. As Ranjeet was a prominent lawyer in Alappuzha, advocates refused to appear for the opposite party which delayed the trial indefinitely.
The accused moved the court seeking to transfer the case outside Alappuzha district. Later the case was shifted to Mavelikkara additional sessions court.
