Kottayam: The principal sessions judge on Tuesday awarded death penalty to migrant worker Narendra Kumar, 28, who murdered an elderly couple and their son at Parampuzha, 2 km from here, on May 16, 2015, and left for hometown Firozabad in UP with stolen cash and jewellery to repay debts worth Rs 2 lakh. Kumar was an employee at the laundry unit run by Mooleparampil Lalason, 71. On the night of the crime, Kumar first axed Lalason’s son Praveen Lal, 28, at the unit adjacent to the house and summoned Lalason and wife Prasanna Kumary, 62, using their son’s mobile phone. Both were felled from behind. To disfigure and destroy evidence, bodies were subjected to electric current and doused with acid.
Kumar, who was hiding under the false name of Jai Singh in Firozabad, was arrested by a police team six days after the crime. Principal Sessions judge S Santhakumary, who pronounced Kumar guilty on March 15, ruled that the murders were pre-planned, brutal and of the rarest of rare category. She also handed down a double life term and seven and two years of imprisonment as additional punishment. The court directed the convict to pay Rs 3 lakh to Vipinlal, the son of the murdered couple. “The number of criminals among migrant labourers has been on the rise nowadays. This verdict is a message to migrant labourers”, the judge observed. The convict had pleaded for lesser punishment considering his age and as he had to look after his parents, but the judge was unconvinced.
Soon after the crime, Kumar had gone to Thiruvananthapuram by Malabar express, and from there to Mumbai via Goa by Jayanthi Janatha. From Mumbai, he went to Firozabad through Agra. The probe team nabbed Kumar by tracking signals of a mobile phone he had stolen. The trial started in the first week of June last year. The 149-page charge-sheet submitted by Pampady Circle Inspector Saju Varghese on August 11 had 72 witnesses, 63 recovered objects and 53 documents.
