Goa ended the year on a sour note when three youth who came down to revel in the highs of ‘Sunburn Klassique’-- the electronic dance music festival held in the last week of December dropped dead; apparently victims of substance abuse which has come to be the signature of such events.
The third youth, Sandeep Kotta (24) of Bengaluru died on the last day of the three-day EDM festival just two days after two other youngsters from Andhra Pradesh -- Sai Prasad Malayala and Venkat Satyanarayana -- just collapsed and died outside the music festival’s venue, apparently when they were in the queue trying to get inside the electrifying venue.
The exact cause has not been revealed by the post-mortem but the viscera of all three youths was preserved and sent for further toxicology tests to outstation forensic laboratories.
Deputy Chief Minister Manohar (Babu) Ajgaonkar meanwhile sought to buy time, claiming the deaths were accidental and that the final reports pin-pointing narcotic drugs as the cause were still not out.
On the other hand, the Police went out of their way to put up a brave front in the face of all round criticism from the Opposition, civil society organisations and others that drugs are freely available in the State with the officiating police chief, Inspector General of Police Jaspal Singh going to great lengths to white-wash his force’s image.
“The Goa Police has zero tolerance vis-a-vis drugs. It will not be right to blame (police). Whenever we get information, we act on it and we make arrests. To say that it is freely available, is not right”, Singh said and pointed to the case where a record Rs 3-crore worth of drugs were seized from a Nigerian in the Calangute area in early November.
The Nigerian - Ifeanyi Pascoel Obi aka Alex (34) - was nabbed with MDMA (ecstasy), cocaine, ganja, 760 grams amphetamine sulphate (speed) and 106 grams charas. And in fact, this single seizure in terms of quantity and gross value, topped the total amount of drugs seized by the Police force in the previous year.
Singh, who has been given charge of the office of Director General of Police after the incumbent Nanda suddenly died in office after a heart attack, sought to highlight the ‘spectacular’ success the police achieved in narco-policing in 2019 and mentioned in particular the November seizure of drugs work nearly Rs 3-crore in Calangute from the Nigerian.
Several other seizures were also effected including the one at the Dabolim international airport where a Portuguese national was accosted for traveling with drugs worth Rs 24 lakh.
To give the devil his due, the drug haul in Calangute was indeed significant on two counts.
First, it is among the rare cases where such a huge amount of banned narcotic substance got netted by the police at the start of the tourism season in November. Secondly, it’s the biggest drug haul ever by the men-in-uniform. The closest the success of any other drug raid has matched it was way back in 2013 around the same time in November when 2,00,000 pounds of amphetamine was seized from a foreigner.
Although 2019 has been a good year in terms of policing drugs if the seizures made are to be gone by, the men-in-uniform failed to keep their slate clean, smeared as their reputation was with the flurry of bad press over the alleged failure to check the flow of drugs at the EDM fest.
Botched probe of shrine desecrations
Away from the shady under-belly of Goa’s tourism nerve centre in North Goa, which is known to be a hotspot for parties and drugs, success has mostly eluded the Goa police in tackling crime and ensuring the culprits are brought to book.
Take for instance, the 2017 cases of desecration of roadside crosses, chapels, ghumtis and temples.
Within days of the the incidents, which raised a dangerous communal situation in the face of the turbulent politics of the post-Assembly election, the Manohar Parrikar-led dispensation and the police tom-tommed the cracking of the cases and paraded one Francis Pereira, alias ‘Boy’ from Curchorem as culprit. Now it turns out, the cops have failed the test of law and have ended up with egg on their face. For, Pereira was acquitted in November by JMFC Shilpa Pandit in the only case from as many as 10 that he was put under trial for.
In 2017, Pereira was booked for 10 cases of desecration of public religious symbols and places of worship including crosses, chapels and ghumtis in the jurisdiction of police stations at Margao, Maina-Curtorim and Cuncolim. The booking of the cases did cool down the public backlash at the time, but subsequent investigations were botched and when the charge-sheets were presented to various trial courts, Pereira got let off at the very first stage of prosecution -- framing of charges.
Every case against Pereira failed to pass the ‘framing of charges’ stage in the courts, save the one related to the desecration of a cross at Cotta, Chandor, in which the then JMFC, N S Amonkar, ordered that Pereira face trial.
In the Chandor case, Pereira was accused of vandalising with a hammer the ‘Tariyalo Khuris’ located in the vicinity of Kushwawati bridge, and thus hurting religious sentiments on the night of June 6-7, 2017. Even the testimonies of six witnesses weren’t sufficient for the police to nail Pereira before JMFC Pandit.
Similar was the fate of the bizzare case in October last year where the 65-year-old Goa-based artist, Shireen Mody and her gardener were found dead at her art studio-cum-residence. The police put out the theory that Mody was murdered by the gardener, who himself succumbed to his injuries which they claimed he suffered from a fall while trying to run away.
According to the police version, Mody was assaulted by Prafulla, her gardener and a native of Assam. He hit her with a heavy weapon in the storeroom and tried to run away. However, he got hurt in a fall and then succumbed, according to the version of the Anjuna police.
But the dead tell no tales and with no one to prosecute with the murderer and the victim both dead, the police version has gone unchallenged and the case buried in Goa’s heap of crime history.
The police claimed they reconstructed the sequence of events from inputs given by neighbours who reported that there use to be bickering and arguments between the two, constantly. Also, CCTV footage showed the gardener running away from the store-room where alleged fracas most likely took place.
Murdered on holiday It is not unusual in Goa that tourists on holiday end up dying victims of violent crime. In one such case reported in Arpora in April last year, A 25-year-old woman tourist from Himachal Pradesh was murdered in her room at a starred hotel.
Identified as Alka Saini, she had reportedly checked in with her boyfriend, who however disappeared and could not be traced after her body was found by maintenance staff when they entered the room for housekeeping service. The body had stab marks in the neck. The only bit of evidence that the hotel’s CCTV camera provided was that two persons were captured exiting the room moments before the staff discovered her body.
