A new born baby boy, hardly a day old, was found abandoned in a heap of dry leaves, in the otherwise beautiful, district of Kollam in Kerala. The infant later did not survive in the hospital.
When the horrible news came to light in early January of this year, despite the unfortunate and shocking nature of the crime, the standalone incident didn't raise eyebrows. It was also the fact that it was one of the many crime reports emerging from the state of Kerala. God's Own Country that's also come to acquire some strange and uncanny association with crimes.
Anyway, continous police investigation led to one Reshma, a resident of Kalluvathukkal village in Kollam. The woman who had left her infant child to die in order to elope with a man she had befriended on Facebook. After Reshma was arrested on June 22, during interrogation she also revealed that the man she had befriended was Anandu and she had never met him in person.
As per the information shared by the police, Reshma did not disclose her pregnancy to her husband Vishnu, nor to anyone else in the family. Reportedly, she delivered the baby in a toilet outside her house before leaving it in a heap of dry leaves.
To further inquire about Anandu's whereabouts, police called two of Reshma's relatives for questioning, her sister-in-law Arya and her niece Greeshma.
This is because Reshma was using a mobile sim card in Arya's name to operate one of her multiple Facebook accounts. Strangely, both the women to be questioned by the police died by suicide by jumping into a river. Further questioning and investigation led to a male friend of Greeshma, who revealed that Greeshma had told him that she and Arya were playing a prank on Reshma by creating a fake Facebook account of Anandu.
Later, police also found out that Arya had told her mother-in-law about the prank before her alleged death by suicide. However, Arya's husband has denied any knowledge of the prank and has also expressed his gratitude to the police for finding out why his wife took the extreme step of suicide.
Reshma's husband, who was abroad and came back after hearing of her arrest, said that if he had any idea about the goings on in the family, he could have immediately put a stop to it.
Currently, Reshma is in judicial custody and in a quarantine centre as she tested Covid positive. Her application for police custody is yet to come up for hearing.
What's with the state, speculate netizens
When it comes to Kerala, how can one not immediately go to Sukumara Karup, the mastermind of the deadliest crimes in Kerala. The case that is not just a folklore in Kerala and a story fancied by celluloid, but one of the most notorious case of police officers. Not just folklore, but statistics paint a similar picture too. In 2017, Kerala witnessed a whopping 6.53 lakh police cases. As per the data shared by National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), the state emerged as the crime capital of the country, with 2.3 lakh of those cases being under IPC.
