Phone call in Hindi helped to find culprits behind brutal murder of Shyamal

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The vigilance shown by the then Thiruvananthapuram City Police Commissioner Manoj Abraham was the turning point in the highly challenging Shyamal Mandal murder case. The case was investigated by T R Rajmohan, the then circle inspector of Fort station and his team led by him. In the first phase there was no evidence. The accused was identified after looking at the phone records and Shyamal's family background. The CBI also confirmed the same findings.

When the body was found in a sack there was no sign of the killers. They could not identify the murderer. A phone call which came to his father's phone asking for ransom was a turning point. When it became clear that he knew his father's number and spoke Hindi, got closer to the killer. The police found the phone sold in Chennai after the murder of Shyamal. Reached to the second accused Muhammed Ali after uniting each of the findings. Though the first accused, Durga Bahadur Bhatt Chhetri, a native of Bengal, was searched several times after receiving information that he had entered Nepal, he could not be apprehended.

The Kerala Police completed the investigation in three months. The investigation was handed over to the CBI after Shyamal's father approached the high court expressing dissatisfaction with the investigation of the Kerala police.