THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The highly decomposed body of a young woman found in a small wooded area near Kovalam on Friday evening has been identified as that of Liga Skromane , a Latvian woman who went missing since March 14 after she left in an auto from the Ayurveda centre where she was being treated for depression.Liga's sister Ilze Skromane and Liga's live-in partner Andrew Jordan reached the spot on Saturday and identified the body. The body was found on a vacant plot with dense undergrowth opposite Govt High School, Vazhamuttom, near Kovalam. The body's condition and the place it was found in made Liga's kin suspect murder, though police say it is too early to arrive at that conclusion.''Such deformities can occur during decomposition. A team of doctors including forensic surgeons will be conducting the post-mortem examination. Only after that can we know more about the nature of the injuries'', said city police commissioner P Prakash. Kerala is considered quite safe for foreigners and tourists and even minor molestation cases, let alone rape and murder, are rare.Ilze and social activists, who have been supporting her in the search for her missing sister, suspect that Liga was murdered mainly because of the location in which her body was found. The spot, though deserted, was flanked by a residential area and a backwater and if she had reached this place on foot she would have been certainly spotted by local people who would have alerted the police since her ‘missing posters had been widely circulated. On the other hand, if Liga had taken the ferry across the backwater, the boatmen would have noticed. Incidentally, the place where her body was found has an abundance of the pong-pong fruit (othalanga), a plant species commonly known as ‘suicide tree’ because of its poisonous quality.Liga, 33, had arrived here along with her sister to undergo Ayurveda treatment at a healing centre in Pothencode outside the city. On March 14, she hired an autorickshaw from Pothencode to go to Kovalam and went missing. Liga had been suffering from severe depression owing to a personal trauma which her family did not wish to disclose, her sister Ilze had said. Following Liga’s disappearance, her live-in partner Andrew Jordan too arrived from Dublin. Both Ilze and Jordan had been searching for Liga on their own, parallel to the police investigation.On Saturday, Ilze alleged that she did not have faith in the government system here and demanded the post-mortem examination to be conducted by private doctors of her choice. The authorities dismissed the demand, saying such a move was not legally possible. Subsequently, the post-mortem examination was conducted at Medical College Hospital with the entire proceedings recorded on camera. The body is currently in the hospital’s morgue.

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