Foreign tourist murder: Police file charge sheet

The Kerala Police today filed a charge sheet in the murder of a Latvian woman tourist at Kovalam, naming two local drug peddlers as the accused.

The 77-page charge sheet was filed before the Judicial First Class Magistrate Court at nearby Neyyattinkara by Assistant Commissioner (Fort) J K Dinil, who led the investigation.

The woman had gone missing under mysterious circumstances from Kovalam on March 14. Her highly decomposed and headless body was recovered from a mangrove forest at nearby Thiruvallam on April 21.

According to the charge sheet, the two accused persons -- Umesh and Udayan- had lured the Latvian woman, who got stranded in the mangrove forest, by offering her drugs and promising to take her around.

The woman fell into a stupor and was later raped, the charge sheet said.

After regaining consciousness, she reacted strongly following which she was strangled to death and her body was disposed deliberately to destroy evidence, it said.

"Umesh and Udayan have been charged under IPC sections 302 (murder), 376 (rape), 201 (causing disappearance of evidence of offence) and sections of the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act," Dinil told PTI.

The two men were arrested on May 3.

The charge sheet contains the statements of 104 witnesses and 102 supportive documents.

The disappearance and subsequent murder of the tourist, who had come to Kerala for Ayurveda treatment along with her sister, had triggered widespread controversy in the state with allegations that the police had not conducted a proper probe into the woman's death.