Sankararaman murder: Court tells police to verify tape

Chennai : The Madras High Court Monday ordered Tamil Nadu Police to examine the veracity of the taped recordings of alleged conversation between Kanchi seer Jayendra Saraswathi and trial court Judge T.Ramaswamy, who is hearing the Sankararaman murder case in which the seer is the main accused.

Revoking the suspension of the murder trial proceedings being held in a court in Puducherry, the court asked the cyber cell of the state police to submit its report in three months’ time.

“The trial can go on now. While the court did not order retrial, it did order thorough probe into the voice recordings on the tape,” Manikandan Vathan Chettiar, advocate for petitioner S.Padma, the widow of Sankararaman, told IANS.

The murder case shocked the nation as two Kanchi seers, Jayendra Saraswathi and his deputy Vijayendra Saraswathi, were alleged to have conspired to kill Sankararaman, the manager in the Varadarajaperumal temple in Kanchipuram.

Sankararaman was killed by a gang Sep 3, 2004, in the temple premises, shortly after he announced he was going to expose some mishappenings in the Kanchipuram Sankara Mutt.

In August last year, the trial court proceedings were suspended after a clutch of petitions was filed seeking a retrial in the murder case. It was maintained that the accused seer tried to influence trial court Judge Ramaswamy after a tape purported to contain the conversations between Jayendra Saraswathi, a women and Ramaswamy surfaced.