Underwear from Down Under haunts a Kerala Left candidate

An Australian caught for alleged drug smuggling, the lawyer who worked to get the not-guilty verdict now faces the people8217;s court

Less than a month to the Assembly poll, an Australian man8217;s underwear that policemen yanked off him some 16 years ago, is now threatening to embarrass the Left Front in the state capital.

The police had claimed to have caught the man, Andrew Salvatore Cervelli, with hashish tucked inside his brief. A local magistrate8217;s court sentenced him to 10 years of rigorous imprisonment. Cervelli, however, walked out a free man after he moved the High Court, and flew safely away to down under.

Reason: the underwear produced in the High Court as evidence suddenly appeared too tiny for the brawny Australian to have got into.

The embarrassed police inspector who handled the case moved the High Court, which ordered a re-look. Two subsequent investigations pointed to hanky-panky, but nothing came off it.

But a decade and a half of intrigue, re-investigations and the involvement of even the Interpol and CBI later, the local police have now finally charge-sheeted ex-lawyer Antony Raju, former Left Front MLA, state general secretary of the Kerala Congress J, and the Left Front8217;s candidate for Thiurvananthapuram West this Assembly poll.

The Director of the State Forensic Sciences Laboratory had deposed that the underwear had been clearly cut and re-stitched to make it ridiculously small, before the High Court had got to see it. The cops zeroed in on Raju, then a junior advocate working under the Australian8217;s local lawyer. The charge is that Raju had taken away the underwear from the magistrate court8217;s custody with the court clerk8217;s complicity, and returned it four months later. Soon, the Australian moved the High Court8212;and Raju8217;s senior got him acquitted pointing out that the underwear was too small for him.

But what really fouled things up was that Cervelli, back in Australia, got picked up by the police in Victoria on a murder charge. While in custody at the Melbourne Remand Centre, Cerville is alleged to have bragged to his co-accused, Wesley John Paul, about his Indian adventure and how he had bribed the 8216;8216;clerk of courts8217;8217; to help botch up the evidence. The Australian cops who grilled Wesley immediately alerted the CBI through Interpol. The CBI referred the report to the Kerala police.

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Ironically, the Congress-led UDF isn8217;t exactly celebrating. Its DIC K candidate Sobhana George was arrested and expelled from the Congress in a case of forging documents to implicate minister K V Thomas in a hawala scam.