Kerala couple, friend die in strange suicide pact at Arunachal hotel
SILCHAR/KOCHI: Three people from Kerala, a married couple and their woman friend, were found dead in a resort in Arunachal Pradesh’s Subansiri district on Tuesday with a note saying they were “happy to go where their destiny is”, state police said on Wednesday, suspecting their death to be linked to some belief in the afterlife. A neighbour of the couple from Kerala spoke of them being members of a cult that believed in reincarnation.
The man and his wife, both 39 and their friend, 29, reached the tourist town of Ziro in Subansiri district on March 28, from Guwahati in Assam; they had flown in to Guwahati from Thiruvananthapuram the previous day. The tragedy was rendered more poignant by the fact that the 29-year old woman was to wed on May 7.
“They checked in on March 28 and were roaming around town till March 31. They did not come out of their room since April 1 and on Tuesday when the hotel employees went to check on them, there was no response and the room was locked from the inside. Hotel authorities informed the police, who opened the door and found their bodies,” a police officer aware of the investigation said, asking not to be named.
Police said there were deep cuts on the wrists of all three. The younger woman’s body was found on a mattress on the floor, the wife’s on the bed and man’s in the washroom. “It looks like the man first killed the two women and then died by suicide,” said Keni Bagra, superintendent of police of Lower Subansiri district.
The note they left behind also had a phone number that helped the police contact the wife’s father, a well-known wildlife photographer in Kerala. The identification only deepened the mystery according to the SP — the Kerala Police told their Arunachal counterparts that the younger woman’s father lodged a missing-persons complaint on March 27.
The father of the older woman told reporters that his daughter was a victim of “black magic”. “I don’t know why they went to Arunachal,” he said before heading to Ziro.
SP Bagra said there were no signs of a struggle in the room. He added that the police found some hair, black bracelets, and a few other items suggestive of some sort of ritual or prayer being done. The note itself said that the three had “no debts, no problems” and were happy to go where their destiny lay.
The Arunachal Police added that their phones also showed that they browsed some sites on life after death. They said the couple were residents of Meenadom in Kottayam and their friend was from Thiruvananthapuram.
Kerala Police added that the couple, an inter-faith one — he was a Christian and she, a Hindu — met while working in an Ayurveda hospital in Thiruvananthapuram (both were Ayurveda practitioners) and were married in 2011.
A relative of the couple said they quit to start an online trading business that did not work out; the man was keen on opening a bakery. This person added that the wife then started teaching German at a private school in Thiruvananthapuram, where she met the second woman, who taught French in the same school. The couple moved to Kottayam recently.