Swathi, the main witness in the 2015 Salem Gokulraj murder case has been brought to the Madurai bench of the Madras High Court in Tamil Nadu on Friday.
The case began roughly seven years ago, in 2015, when the decapitated body of a Dalit teenager named V Gokulraj was discovered next to a railroad track in Tamil Nadu’s Namakkal district. On March 8, 2022, the Madurai Special Court sentenced the principal defendant, S Yuvraj, a caste outfit offender and the founder of Theeran Chinnamalai Counter Assembly, together with nine other murder convicts, to life in prison.
On June 23, 2015, a group of persons abducted Gokulraj, an engineering student from Salem’s Omalur, from a shrine in Tiruchengode.
The boy was reportedly seen talking to a girl of Gounder community, a day before his disfigured body was found on the railway track. Initially 15 people were arrested in the matter by Crime Investigation Department and it was alleged that he was killed for falling in love with a girl from some other community.
The Madurai branch of the High Court, presided over by the bench of Justices Ramesh and Anand Venkatesh, ordered the appearance in court today of Swathi, a key witness who became combative during the 2018 trial.
“In this case, it is very obligatory to investigate Swathi. These safeguards must be taken to ensure that Swathi comes before this Court without any fear in her mind when she is questioned by this Court,” the Court observed.
On May 8, 2019, the case was moved from Namakkal Court to Madurai District’s third Additional Sessions Court (Special Court for Prevention of Atrocities) in response to Gokulraj’s mother Chitra’s appeal.
On March 8, the Madurai court rendered a decision in this matter and sentenced 10 persons, including Yuvraj, to life in jail while clearing 5 others. Ten people, including Yuvraj, filed an appeal against this judgement with the Madurai branch of the court. In parallel, Gokularaj’s mother, the CBCID, and the CBI filed a number of applications asking for confirmation of the accused’s conviction in the case.