more-in SIVAGANGA The district police have filed the charge sheet in the Kachanatham triple murder case within 90 days of the occurrence of the crime, arraigning 31 people, including a man and his two sons and a woman. On the instruction of Superintendent of Police T. Jayachandran, a special team completed the investigation and filed the charge sheet before the special court for trying Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities) Act cases at the district court complex here recently. “We worked overtime to file the charge sheet within the 90-day period and are geared up for conducting a speedy trial,” Mr. Jayachandran said. The police were trying to present all the 31 accused, presently lodged in Madurai Central Prison, when the case would come up before the court on Thursday, he said. The police said 33 people were originally arraigned in the case and two of them – ‘Michael’ Muniyandi and ‘Sullan’ Karuppaiah – were still absconding, while the others were either arrested by the police or surrendered before courts. The police would go ahead with the trail with 31 accused after splitting the case in respect of the two absconding accused. The accused, forming a gang, launched a brutal attack and murdered three persons of Devendrakula Vellalar community at Kachanatham on the night of May 28 after a tiff with them. Special police teams fanned out to different places and arrested 23 accused, while eight others, including Chandrakumar, 47, and his two sons – Suman, 23, and Arunkumar, 21 – cited as the main accused in the case, surrendered before a court. Subsequently, the district police had detained the trio and seven other accused under the Goondas Act. Later, all but one of them managed to get the detention order quashed. The accused, however, remained in the jail as they did not seek bail or did not get bail, the police said. Three persons – K. Arumugam, 65, father of Deivendran, a Lance Naik, serving in the Indian army, A. Shanmuganathan, 31, and V. Chandrasekar, 34 – were hacked to death in the attack, allegedly carried out by the gang members to wreak vengeance on the suppressed community people for questioning their authority, the police said.

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