Kerala man held for wife's snakebite murder

Ashraf Padanna

Police in Kerala have arrested a man for allegedly killing his wife by getting a snake to bite her in their bedroom earlier this month.

The young mother was already undergoing treatment for snakebite while he planned the murder at her parents’ home in Anchal in the southern district of Kollam.

Relatives of Uthara, 25, said she was sleeping with her husband Sooraj and one-year-old son Dhruv when she suffered the snakebite.

She was dead when he brought her body to the hospital the next morning. The relatives grew suspicious as she had similarly suffered a snakebite at his home a month earlier.

They found a cobra under the cot on which she had slept in an air-conditioned room with all its windows closed.

Later, a snake charmer admitted to the police that he had sold the snake to Sooraj for Rs 10,000.

"They killed my daughter for money. I had given her 90 sovereigns of gold (worth around Rs 3.1 million),” her father Vijayasenan said.

"I had also given him a car and a lot of money, but he’s never satisfied with what he got and continued to demand more. His relatives were also greedy.”

In his complaint, he had said Sooraj had come with a heavy bag to his home on that fateful night on May 6.

Police later found that he had experience in handling snakes, and he used to demand money from her parents. On both occasions of snakebites, Sooraj was near his wife.

Police also found that he had opened her bank locker on May 2, four days before her death.