Odisha police refuse to remove decomposing corpse, insult search party from Kerala

For about a week, the body of head constable Jose P. Joseph, a serving jawan of the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) hailing from Malappuram, lay putrefying and exposed to the elements, near the tracks near the Balugaon railway station, in Khordha district of Odisha.

He was believed to have died falling off a train. The body was barely 200 metres from the railway station, yet no one cared to even remove it, say police officers from Malappuram who went there to retrieve the body and managed to bring it back home here.

But worse was to follow.

Neither the railway authorities, nor the CISF cared to launch a search for the missing jawan in spite of the Kerala police triangulating the dead jawan’s mobile phone signals and conveying his location to them.

It was Malappuram Sub Inspector of Police Richard Varghese and civil police officer K.K. Udayaraj, who went to Balugaon after tracing his mobile trail to find the jawan’s decomposed body there.

Jose, who was presumed to have fallen off the train on February 10, had been lying there until February 16.

That apart, Mr. Richard told The Hindu that he and his colleague had to bribe almost everyone concerned, including the Odisha policemen, to get the body removed and a post-mortem conducted, which was mandatory before they could attempt to bring it to Kerala.

“It was a strange post-mortem. The doctor merely walked up and signed a paper, standing at quite a distance from the corpse,” said Jose’s brother who accompanied the police team from here. Mr. Richard and Mr. Udayaraj said they were astounded by more that they faced there.

“We were treated like dogs by the policemen there. They did not even allow us inside their police station, saying that we had touched the putrefying body and have therefore become defiled and untouchable,” said Mr. Richard.

Since they were not to be allowed to defile the police station by stepping inside, the Malappuram police officials were made to sign the FIR standing on a septic tank behind the police station. “They even discarded the pen with which we signed the FIR,” Mr. Richard said.

More was in the offing. With the Odisha police not helping to get an ambulance to carry the body, Mr. Richard says they were made to hunt for a vehicle themselves, after the decomposed body was handed to them in a plastic bag.

They struggled with the body for hours in a Tata Sumo that they managed to find, bearing its stench for about 400 km, before they reached Visakhapatnam.

At one point on the way, local people even threatened to burn the vehicle with the stinking body in it.

It was a Malayali group at Visakhapatnam that helped the Kerala policemen to get an ambulance with a freezer, which carried the body to Malappuram for burial.

The body of the jawan finally got some official respects from District Collector T. Bhaskaran and P. Ubaidulla, MLA, and local dignitaries who were present.