A Special Investigation Team of the Kerala Police on Friday arrested three RSS workers for the murder of a Madrassa instructor at Choori in Kasaragode district earlier this week. The accused have been identified as S Ajesh (20), S Nithin (19) and S Akhilesh (25). The three of them are reported to have confessed to the crime. They were produced in Court and remanded till April 7.
Mohammed Riyaz Moulavi, the 34-year old madrasa instructor was sleeping in his room near the Muhayuddin Juma Masjid, when Ajesh barged into it and slit his throat using a wedge-shaped weapon, in the early hours of Tuesday. A native of coorg, Riyaz has been teaching in the Issathul Islam madrassa for the past nine years.
According to the police, Abdul Azeez Musaliyar, the mosque’s cleric was woken up by loud cries from Riyaz’s room. But, when he tried to enter the room, the gang of rained stones on him. The cleric ran inside the mosque and used the public address system to alert the people in the locality. But, by the time the residents arrived on the spot, the assailants had managed to escape. Though Riyaz, who was lying in a pool of blood, was taken to the hospital, he could not be saved. His body reportedly had 28 stab wounds.
The body, which was taken to the adjacent Kannur district for autopsy, was not brought back to Kasaragode and taken directly to his hometown Coorg in Karnataka, in view of the tension in the area. The motive behind the murder was to allegedly create communal tension in the region.
Kasaragode is a communally sensitive area in the Kerala-Karnataka border, with a large Muslim population. The incident had led to some level of tension in the area, but the police and district administration ensured that calm was maintained. This is the second murder of a Muslim man by RSS-BJP cadres in Kerala in recent times. In November 2016, eight RSS-BJP workers were arrested for the murder of Faizal, who had earlier converted from Hinduism to Islam.
The two murders are seen as part of the RSS’s larger game-plan to create communal tension in the state, which has largely remained out of the influence of the Sangh Parivar, and gain a foothold here. The mainstream English news channels, based of New Delhi, which have been carrying RSS propaganda on attacks against RSS men in Kerala, has ignored the news of these murders.