Three held guilty in Safiya illegal confinement, murder case

Kasaragod, Jul 14: Eight years after the brutal killing of Safiya, 14, a maid servant who was working in the house of a Goa-based public works contractor, a court here held guilty three persons, including a woman in the infamous murder case.

One of the three persons held guilty by a local court in the Safiya murder case being escorted to the Vidyanagar police station in Kasaragod on Tuesday

Delivering the verdict in the 2007 sensational murder case the district sessions court judge M.J. Shakthidharan set two persons free of the charges and would pronounce the sentence on Wednesday.

The court at the end of its six months trial held K.C. Hamsa, 52, his wife Mymoona, 46, and their close relative M. Abdulla, 48, a resident of Arikkadi near Kumbala in the case and discharged Moidu Haji, 59, a native of Madikkeri, who facilitated the girl employed in the contractor’s Goa residence and A. Gopalakrishnan, 57, who allegedly helped in scuttling the case while being posted with the Adhur police station from the case for want of evidence invoking various provisions of IPC sections.

The court found Hamsa for resorting to illegal confinement and murder of the girl and attempts to destroy evidence. While Mymoona was found to have helped in kidnapping and forceful confinement and trying to shield the prime accused by destroying evidences. The court found that Abdulla, the fourth accused in the case, had tried to help the culprits by destroying evidence.

Since the murder did not have any eye witness, the court had to rely solely on scientific evidence to settle the case which generated widespread sensation and acrimony paving way for formation of an action committee here to clear the apprehension behind the mysterious disappearance of the girl hailing from Karnataka’s Madikkeri.

The court had examined 57 persons, 64 documents and 12 articles that threw light into the brutal murder of girl in 2007. The case was registered in December 2006 after Moidu, Safia’s father, who reached here to take back the girl with him lodged a police complaint here that the girl was found missing from Hamsa’s residence after she was allegedly moved to Goa.

The case was handed over to Crime Branch following nearly three months long vociferous protest by a local action committee formed to unravel the mystery behind the disappearance.

The meticulous probe by availing services of a senior forensic surgeon attached to the Kozhikkode medical college recovered in 2009 the girl’s chopped skeletal remains in a plastic bag concealed in an under construction check dam site in Goa.