By IANS
Kottayam (Kerala) : A Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) team Saturday questioned a Catholic priest here in connection with the mysterious murder of a nun 15 years ago.
It was for the third time that CBI was quizzing Thomas Kottor, the Diocesan Chancellor of the Catholic Church. A new CBI team has already sought permission from Chief Judicial Magistrate P.D. Sarangadharan to take Kottor for a truth serum test.
Sister Abhaya, an inmate of Pious X hostel near here, was found dead in the well of the convent March 27, 1992. The CBI concluded in November 1996 that the death was a homicide but the murderer remained untraced.
Three former CBI teams have failed to crack the mystery even as the Kerala police had earlier dismissed the case as that of suicide.
The new CBI team was appointed last month after Joe Mon Puthenpurackal, a social activist who formed the Abhaya Action Committee in 1992, met the CBI director in May and demanded a fresh probe.
The 15-year-old case came back into the limelight in April after a newspaper reported that Abhaya’s medical reports had been tampered with at the Chemical Examiner’s Laboratory in Thiruvananthapuram.
According to the media report, the results of the vaginal swab were positive for semen but were corrected in the medical test report using a whitener and rewritten as negative. Two lady officials of the laboratory have been suspended from service.
The new CBI team headed by R.M. Krishna also questioned a middle-aged man who is believed to have called up Abhaya’s family recently on several occasions and told them that he knew the truth about what happened.