The Kerala police team investigating a murder attempted to reconstruct the crime scene with a live snake and a dummy—and it worked.
One could watch the video here.
The victim has been identified as Uthra, a native of Kollam, Kerala was allegedly murdered by her husband, Sooraj, in May last year. The husband gave her sleeping pills before planting an India cobra to bite and kill her.
Police had arrested the husband last year on suspicion of murder. It was alleged that this was the second time he had tried to kill her using a snake.
The video released by the police shows a cobra being released near the dummy. Manish Kumar, the Chairman of the Mahindra Wildlife Foundation revealed in an interview that, the investigators dropped the snake on the dummy twice or thrice, “but it didn’t do anything, and tried to hide out”.
While Uthra had two wounds that were 2.5 cm and 2.8 cm deep. according to the report submitted by the State Training Institute of the Forest Department, when the dummy arm was used to touch the snake, the cobra struck after numerous attempts. The team measured the natural bite and found it to be 1.7 only cm wide.
This experiment revealed that Uthra’s body did not have any natural snake bite wounds. In the experiment, when the snake’s head was caught and bitten, the depth of the wound increased which suggested that the snake was forced by someone to bite.
The trial was based on the statement of the accused Sooraj and the evidence had been obtained by the probe team. The is the first incident of murder from a snake bite, in the state.
