Horror run: Rajdoot to Hummer

Nisham, the son of beedi businessman Adakkaparambil Abdul Khadar, grew up in Muttichur. He was the boy whose Ambassador car kicked up dust and fear in equal measure as it sped through the village’s narrow, mud roads. The people of Muttichur knew, even then, that it was best to keep away from this boy who flexed his money like muscles. Last week, Nisham rammed his Hummer into a security guard at Sobha City, an upscale apartment complex near Thrissur town where he had been living for some years now, pinning the man against a concrete wall for not opening the gates “fast enough”. The guard, Chandrabose, died of his injuries on February 16.

Nisham’s Range Rover and a Mercedes Benz in his garage at Muttichur house.

As he grew up and out of Muttichur, Nisham hardly visited his family home. But he retained his stake in the family’s flagship business, the Tirunelveli (Tamil Nadu)-based King Beedi Co, of which he is managing director. Apart from being a prominent tobacco supplier, he had business interests ranging from a hotel in Dubai to jewellery businesses in the Middle East and Kerala (King’s Jewellers in Triprayar, Thrissur) to real-estate.

But through all this, vehicles, particularly cars, remained an obsession. On his Facebook page, he calls himself ‘Nisham King’, “a fast paced guy… that is me. Live love laugh… cheers”. He owns a fleet of 18 imported cars, some of which — a Bentley, Rolls-Royce, Aston Martin, Road Ranger, Ferrari and Jaguar — are parked in Sobha City. Like him, many of his cars have got into a scrap with authorities, and got away each time.

“Nisham was crazy about cars even when he was a child. He never went to college, all he did was drive around. His father was very different, helping everyone in the village… very pleasant,’’ recalls C K Divyanandan, a native of Muttichur who has known Nisham’s family for several decades.

A video grab of his 9-year-old driving his Ferrari.

Theirs was a traditional, middle-class family and Nisham’s father Khadar, like many others from his village, moved to Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, where he ran a small eatery. While there, he developed an interest in the beedi business and decided it was time to return home. With tendu leaves sourced from Ceylon, Khadar started a beedi unit, King Beedi Company, at Tirunelveli, Tamil Nadu. Twenty years ago, Khadar died, leaving the beedi business to his three sons. Nisham — the second of Khadar’s three sons from two marriages — runs it with his brothers, all settled in Thrissur.

The gates of Adakkaparambil House have been shut since the day Chandrabose, the security guard at Sobha, died. Nisham’s mother Subaida, who lived here, has left for an undisclosed destination, say neighbours.

K Biju, who lives a few houses away from Adakkaparambil House, says the family never interacted with neighbours. “Until two years ago, he used to sponsor a volleyball tournament hosted by a local club in Muttichur. He would attend the event, but not even look at the organisers or talk to them. Then last year, he insisted that the tournament should be named after him. He made several other unreasonable demands and finally, the organisers decided to stop the tournament,” he says.

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Sobha City, Thrissur’s swankiest residential address, is located 26 km from Muttichur. It’s here, in a three-bedroom flat on the seventh floor of Topaz tower that overlooks a crescent-shaped artificial lake, that Nisham lived with his wife Amal and their two school-going children.

Nisham isn’t any more popular here than he is at Muttichur. Residents recall him as being “arrogant” and “hot-tempered”, someone who hardly bothered to mingle with his neighbours. “He would not smile at others. He did not like anyone questioning him. He hardly turned up at social gatherings and parties and when he did, he would sit in a corner, drinking,’’ says a resident.

Nisham’s Hummer.

Some of the residents have had minor run-ins with Nisham over parking space. “As per rules, each one of us gets to park only one car, but Nisham would park at least eight cars in the complex. He took over the parking space of others, particularly of NRIs who didn’t stay here,’’ says one of them.

A few months ago, they say, Nisham uncharacteristically hosted a party at Sobha for its residents. “It was touted as the birthday celebration of his two children,” says a neighbour.

Nisham, who had a love marriage with Amal, has had trouble in his marriage as well. Last year, she slapped a domestic violence case against him at the local police station. She even got a court order to prevent Nisham from entering the apartment complex for six months. But the two reached a settlement soon after.

Neighbours say that soon after the Hummer incident, Amal left Sobha City with her children for an undisclosed place. “Their children study in Classes V and I, but both of them have not turned up in school after the incident,’’ says the principal of the school the children go to.

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If Nisham lived big, it was because he had business interests apart from his family venture in which he had a 30 per cent stake. The beedi company now supplies to a major tobacco firm in India, apart from exporting tobacco to the Middle East. Police sources say his fortunes shot up after 2006, when he began investing in real estate.

“He would buy vast tracts of paddy field on the outskirts of Thrissur at cheap rates and reclaim those for real-estate development. He earned crores just by selling reclaimed paddy plots or by developing them as real-estate projects at premium prices,’’ said a police source.

George Vattukulam, president of Malayalam Vedi, a Thrissur-based anti-corruption organisation, says, “A few years ago, he purchased 30 acres of paddy land in Thrissur at Rs 3,000 for a cent (unit of land measurement used in Kerala). Later, he reclaimed this fertile land and sold it for Rs 5 lakh a cent. In 2009, I complained to the district administration about this illegal land-filling, but nobody intervened.”

The King Group’s King Spaces and Real Estate has completed two residential projects and is working on three other ventures.

Nisham and his family home in Muttichur

Besides buying and selling plots, Nisham is said to have bought buildings in the city at vantage points. “We found out that he gets Rs 5 lakh a month from a shopfloor he has rented out,’’ says a police officer.

It’s this money, they say, that Nisham threw around every time he got into trouble. He would allegedly approach the aggrieved party, police, middlemen and witnesses with wads of currency notes and get away. And when that didn’t work, he allegedly flaunted his political connections. He claimed to have friends across political parties.

Police sources say that whenever he got into trouble, he dropped names, usually of a senior IUML leader. He also used these names to coerce and threaten. A day before the Hummer attack, Nisham allegedly threatened a small trader near his textile showroom, asking him to vacate the premises within two days.

Nisham has over 12 criminal cases filed against him, all in Kerala. According to the police, three of these cases were settled with the consent of the victims, he has been charge-sheeted in two cases and is yet to be charge-sheeted in two others, including the recent murder.

Many of the cases against Nisham involved women. A one-time friend in Bangalore filed a case of rape against him (he has been charge-sheeted), he allegedly threatened a woman on Facebook with rape (settled out of court in September last year) and allegedly abused his sister-in-law on phone. Nisham’s brother Abdul Rasak had filed a case against him under the IT Act, alleging Nisham had sent a vulgar message to his wife. The Kerala High Court quashed the case after Rasak withdrew his complaint.

“He has money and influential people at his beck and call. And then, because he can afford it, he has the best advocates to fight his cases. Even the complainants figure out soon enough that it’s better to be in his good books,’’ says a police officer.

In 2013, he was arrested after he allegedly tried to prevent a woman police inspector, T Devi, during a routine inspection. “He was driving a brand new Rolls Royce. When we stopped him, we found him to be under the influence of alcohol. He started arguing, saying no police station in Kerala was good enough to park his vehicle,’’ says Devi. To prevent him from driving away, Devi got into the car to take out the keys. At this point, she says, Nisham, who was outside, locked the doors with his remote control, trapping her inside. More policemen arrived and it was only after a heated argument that Nisham let the sub-inspector out. He was arrested and produced before a local court,which first remanded him in judicial custody and then granted him bail the following day.

But it was a home video earlier that year that shot Nisham into the national spotlight. His wife Amal had shot a video of their son Ishan, then 9, at the wheel of Nisham’s Ferrari with his four-year-old younger brother sitting beside him. The video of the boy driving through Sobha City went viral, sparking outrage and leading to Nisham’s arrest. But again, he soon got out on bail.

In 2012, Nisham had allegedly attacked one T R Shamsudheen of Viyyur in Thrissur, storming into his house after a dispute over parking vehicles at a gymnasium. Police chargesheeted Nisham but he got away after Shamsudheen, his victim, filed an affidavit that facilitated Nisham to move a petition in the High Court to quash the case.

Thrissur city police commissioner R Nishanthini says the police will now invoke provisions under the Kerala Anti-Social Activities Prevention Act (KAAPA). “A few out-of-court settlements won’t change anything. We will go ahead and start invoking KAAPA,” she says.

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Back in Muttichur, a staff at the King Beedi store in the compound of Nisham’s family home, says, “Did you see that skeleton tied to the bike? It was kept in front of sir’s textile showroom in Thrissur for very long. I don’t know why he kept it there. He had a long dispute with other traders in the area. He probably used it to intimidate them.” That night in Sobha City, when he pinned the guard down with his Hummer, Nisham was trying to intimidate — once again.