The Kerala couple and a ‘sorcerer’ were arrested on charges of murdering two women in the name of a ritual. They tortured the women for over four months. The accused allegedly told the police that they chopped the body of one of the two victims into 56 pieces. They did not stop there as they cooked some pieces and ate them.
The two victims were killed in the ‘most-brutal way’ by Mohd Shafi, said the Kochi Police Commissioner. The accused took sadistic pleasure to torture the victims and brutalised the two women before chopping their heads off. “He is a hardened criminal… a psychopath,” Nagaraju told on Wednesday.
People were stunned when the macabre early details of the case, which had a couple consenting to human sacrifice in India’s most literate state, came to light on Tuesday. According to Kerala’s chief minister, Pinarayi Vijayan, kidnapping and murdering individuals for the sake of money or superstitious beliefs is an unimaginable crime.
Mohd Shafi, the man who allegedly paid the couple seeking a better life 1.5 lakh for bringing the first woman to the couple’s home, has eight charges against him, including the 2020 rape of a 75-year-old woman in Kolencherry, filed against him. In this case, Shafi, a truck driver at the time, was detained and spent roughly a year in jail. 52-year-old Shafi moved his headquarters to Gandhi Nagar in Kochi earlier this year after being granted bail.
Laila, Bhagaval’s wife in her statement told the police that Shafi persuaded them to eat a small portion of the sacrifice to get the best results. The victims were tortured for over an hour before they were finally beheaded and their bodies were chopped into small pieces.
Legally, the couple who followed Shafi’s counsel and paid for the crime are equally responsible; yet, Shafi is being treated as the primary accused in the case. According to Nagaraju, the authorities have not been able to figure out how Shafi, a dropout from school, persuaded the couple to participate in a human sacrifice.
The two women’s body was chopped and the parts were buried in different parts of Bhagaval Singh’s compound and acknowledged that it was only because the police acted on Padma’s missing report filed on September 27 that they stumbled upon the two grisly crimes.