Ranjith Sreenivasan.
Credit: X/@CTRavi_BJP
Thiruvananthapuram: Fifteen activists of banned outfit Popular Front of India (PFI) and Social Democratic Party of India (SDPI) were sentenced to death on Tuesday in connection with the murder of BJP-OBC Morcha state secretary Ranjith Sreenivasan at Alappuzha district in Kerala in 2021 December.
A local court at Mavelikara in Alappuzha pronounced the landmark judgment in which the conspirators were also awarded death sentences. All the 15 accused in the case were earlier found guilty by the court. Since one of the accused did not appear before the court on Tuesday, his sentence was reserved by the court.
Sreenivasan was the victim of back to back political killings at Alappuzha. While PFI's political arm SDPI's state secretary K S Shan was murdered on 2021 December 18 evening allegedly by RSS activists, Renjith Sreenivas was killed with in 12 hours on the the next day. Charge-sheet in the Shan murder was also already filed. Prior to Shan's murder, RSS activist Nandukrishnan was murdered allegedly by SDPI-PFI activists in the district in 2021 February.
Sreenivasan was brutally murdered in front of his family members. His mother was also attacked. While 12 persons were directly involved in the attack, others were involved in the conspiracy.
The prosecution sought maximum punishment by citing that it was a well planned act by a trained killer squad and the brutal murder was executed in front of the victim's family members in a diabolical manner. Hence it needs to be considered as a rarest of rare case.
Special prosecutor Prathap Padickkal said that it was considered to be for the first time in the country that all the accused in the murder of one person were being awarded death sentence. The judge V G Sreedevi observed that the accused deserved no leniency for the brutal killing of an unarmed person.
Those found guilty in the case are Naizam, Ajmal, Anup, Muhammed Aslam, Salam, Abdul Kalam, Safaruddin, Manshad, Jazeeb, Navaz, Shemeer, Nazeer, Zakir Hussain, Shaji and Shernas.
Apart from the death sentence, the convicts were also sentenced for various other offences like conspiracy, destruction of evidence and attacking the victim's mother.
The family of Sreenisan welcomed the judgement.
The Renjith Sreenivasan murder case was among the charges against PFI cited by the centre for banning PFI in 2022.