THAZHEPEEDIKAYIL VEERANKUTTI HAJI Vs. CROWN

JUDGEMENT

(1.) The appellant has been convicted and sentenced to death by the learned Sessions Judge, South Malabar, for the murder of a Moplah woman and her son, a child of seven, on the 9 July, last.

(2.) The woman whose name was Beema Umma had come to the house of the appellant in order to attend upon his wife during her confinement. The evidence for the prosecution was to the effect that the woman and her child went to bed in the house of the appellant on the night of the 9 July, and the next morning they were missing. Their dead bodies were discovered on the 22 July, buried in the compound of the appellant's house near the well. The lady doctor (P.W. 1) who made the post mortem examination on the 23 was unable to say what the cause of death had been in either case owing to the advanced stage of de-composition which both bodies had reached. There was however no difficulty about the identification of the bodies.

(3.) The evidence against the appellant was partly direct and partly circumstantial. The direct evidence was given by his own son Mamad Koya examined as P.W. 13. He is a boy of 16 years of age and he said that on the night of the 9 July, he woke up hearing a cry and saw his father by the side of Beema in the courtyard tightening a cloth round her neck. When Beema ceased to cry out and lay motionless, his father, P.W. 13 says, then took Beema's son to the yard and strangled him to death. Afterwards P.W. 13 under the instructions of his father helped to carry the body of Beema to a side room in the south of the house. The father carried the corpse of the little boy to the same room and the appellant locked up that room. Next morning P.W. 13 says that again under the instructions of his father he sold two gold manikathilas belonging to the deceased Beema to a goldsmith P.W. 6. On the following day, the 11 July, he says that he sold six gold manikathilas to a shroff in Calicut who has been examined as P.W. 7. The money received for these jewels, he says, he gave to his father. On the Saturday, the 10 July, he says that his father buried the bodies in a pit in front of the house and four days later his father dug a fresh pit near the well and re-buried them there. The appellant's wife was examined as P.W. 11 and she said that Beema had gone to sleep in the house on the night of the 9 July, and that after midnight she heard some cry uttered by Beema and in the morning Beema and her son were not to be seen.