Journalism of Courage
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On September 3, 2005, Smitha George, then 25, newly married and in a foreign land, vanished without a trace. But she purportedly left behind a letter in the flat in Dubai from where she went missing, saying she was leaving to join her lover. A decade later, in February 2015, with no trace of Smitha, the Kerala Police arrested her husband Valiyaparambil Antony, accusing him of allegedly forging the letter and allegedly torturing Smitha and causing her disappearance.
Now, almost another decade later, comes another twist: last month, a court in Kochi acquitted Antony of both the charges against him.
The CBI court also took note of a letter from the UAE — sent in July this year in response to the CBI’s Letter Rogatory — which said that an unidentified body of a woman had been found in a Sharjah hospital morgue on September 6, 2006, a year after Smitha went missing. The UAE letter said Smitha’s family had been shown photographs of the body and they had “confirmed 100%” that it was hers. The letter also said forensic tests conducted on the body — which was buried on November 22, 2006 — had confirmed that the person died of “natural” causes.
But the questions remained. Where was Smitha between September 3, 2005, when she reportedly went missing, and September 6, 2006, when her body turned up in a morgue in Sharjah, around 30 km from Dubai? If the body in the morgue was indeed hers, how did she die? And was there another person in Antony and Smitha’s marriage?
Nineteen years ago, on September 1, 2005, Smitha flew to Dubai on a 55-day visa to join her husband Antony, who then worked with a marine engineering firm in Dubai. On September 5, Antony complained to the India consulate in Dubai that his wife had gone missing two days ago, on September 3. He also claimed to have recovered the letter in which she purportedly said she was leaving him for her lover. Police said he also sent a copy of the letter to Smitha’s family in Kochi, Kerala. The consulate alerted the Dubai police, which took over the investigation and questioned Antony, but that did not yield any leads.
Days after Smitha allegedly went missing, on September 8, 2005, Smitha’s father Alasakodath George, who worked at an engineering workshop, approached the police in Kochi, seeking an investigation into his daughter’s disappearance. Months later, in 2006, the High Court directed the Indian consulate to register a complaint with the Dubai police and sought an action-taken report. The consulate told the court that in spite of repeated attempts, the Dubai police could not trace Smitha.
In 2008, the High Court directed the consulate to publish Smitha’s photographs and details in local dailies in Dubai in an effort to trace her. The court, however, did not entertain George’s demand for a case to be registered against Antony in India. George had raised doubts about the conduct of his son-in-law in the wake of his daughter’s disappearance.
As the search for Smitha continued in the UAE and her family in Kochi waited for news of their missing daughter, Antony came to Kerala and got a divorce from Smitha on the grounds that she had an extramarital relationship and had left him. Later, he married again and flew to the US to take up a job as a marine engineering fabricator.
With no headway into the missing case in the UAE, Smitha’s father George in 2011 approached then chief minister Oommen Chandy, who directed the Crime Branch to probe the matter. The Crime Branch did a forensic examination of ‘Smitha’s letter’ and concluded that the letter had been forged. A case of forgery was registered against Antony and, in February 2015, the Crime Branch arrested him on charges of forgery — police had then tactfully got him back from the US before arresting him.
By then, a decade had passed since Smitha’s disappearance.
Soon after Antony’s arrest, the Dubai police reopened Smitha’s case. It was then that they stumbled upon a crucial lead: an unidentified woman’s body had been admitted to a morgue in UAE’s Sharjah city. As part of their investigation, the UAE authorities collected blood samples from Smitha’s family members through UAE-based advocate Shamsudeen Karunagappally, to see if there was a DNA match for the body. “The family members were shown the photograph of the body in the morgue, which they identified as Smitha’s,’’ recalls Shamsudeen. Smitha’s mother Fancy and sister Sajani were taken to the UAE, where they were shown the photos of the body.
Back in Kerala, in 2016, the CBI took over the forgery case from the Crime Branch following an order by the High Court.
In 2019, the CBI submitted the chargesheet against Antony in the Kochi court while keeping the investigation open for the UAE’s response to its Letter Rogatory. It’s this response, from the “Central Authority of the UAE represented by its Ministry of Justice”, that paved the way for Antony’s acquittal.
The court relied on the results of the brain mapping and layer voice analysis tests that Antony was subjected to. On the brain mapping test, the court said the CBI “obtained the opinion that the accused does not have information related to the victim’s missing’’. The court also quoted the expert opinion obtained by the CBI in the layered voice analysis test that there was “no probability of Antony being involved in Smitha’s disappearance or in forging the purported letter written by her’’.
On the forgery case, the court said, “Expert opinions are diverse. The chain of passing of the letter until it reached the police is shrouded in mystery and this affects the credibility of the letter.”
According to the case details, it was Smitha’s cousin Maxson who reportedly handed over the “forged letter’’ to the investigating officer.
But in its order acquitting Antony in the case, the court mentioned another name — Devayani. “The deceased Devayani alone might know what transpired on the day hours of September 3, 2005.’’
Devayani, a housekeeper from Kerala who had moved to Dubai, emerged as a key figure in the case after she was taken into custody in May 2015. She was produced before a magistrate at Mattancherry in Kochi, where her statement was recorded under Section 164 of the CrPC.
According to her statement, Devayani and Antony stayed together for two years before his marriage to Smitha. Before Smitha reached Dubai, in September 2005, Antony allegedly asked Devyani if she could temporarily share her accommodation with the couple until they found a new place.
In her statement, Devayani recalled that Smitha reached her flat “on a Thursday” (likely September 1, 2005). On the third day (September 3, when Smita reportedly went missing), Devyani said, when she reached her flat in the evening after work, she found the couple in the room, with blood oozing out of Smitha’s forehead. Antony, who was allegedly holding a knife, allegedly threatened her, Devayani said in her statement. That night, she alleged, she saw two others with Antony in the room. She alleged that she was “slapped and threatened”, following which all of them landed in the police station. The next day, when she returned to her flat, she said, she confronted Smitha’s cousin Maxson, who then worked in Dubai and who had come to check on Smitha. A scuffle followed, with Maxson questioning Devayani’s role in Antony’s life and subsequently, both of them spent a few months in jail.
According to the Kerala police, in 2006, after being released from jail, Devayani was deported to India. Back home in Kerala, police said, she converted to Christianity, took on a new name and a new passport, and allegedly flew to Kuwait as Annie Varghese. Following an illegal stay in Kuwait, they said, Devayani was again allegedly forced to return home.
In 2013, Devayani once again went to Kuwait, where she worked in a mess. Police said that in 2015, with Antony’s arrest in Kerala in the letter forgery case bringing the Smitha case back into focus in the Gulf media, Devayani, whose identity was reportedly outed, returned to Kerala, where she was taken into custody by the Crime Branch.
After the CBI took over the probe in 2016, Devayani underwent a layered voice analysis test. On June 16, she was being taken to Ahmedabad for a brain mapping test, when, hours before her train reached the station, Devayani asked for permission to use the washroom and allegedly consumed an insecticide. She was admitted to a hospital in Ahmedabad, where she died on July 9.
With that, a key link in the case had fallen apart.
The court in its verdict noted that Devayani’s layered voice analysis suggested “a high possibility of suspect Devayani having been involved in the disappearance of Smitha”.
Back in Kochi’s Edappally, time has stood still for the Alasakodath family. For over a decade after her disappearance, Smitha’s father George stubbornly refused to surrender their landline phone — that was the only number Smitha knew and he hoped she would call from somewhere. In 2017, after a tiring battle to seek out his daughter, George died, leaving behind his wife and elder daughter.
Smitha’s brother-in-law Ajay George said, “We are clueless about what happened to Smitha. The court verdict does not give us any relief. If her body was found in 2006 at the morgue, why were we not informed about that for a decade?”
Advocate M J Santhosh, who appeared for Antony in the CBI case, told The Indian Express, “Antony is innocent. All the tests done on him — brain mapping, voice analysis, etc — gave him a clean chit. The Crime Branch and the CBI went after him without substantive evidence. The CBI should not have filed a final report against him before getting the report from Dubai (the response to the CBI’s Letter Rogatory). Who will compensate him for the loss of his career? He was working in the US while he was arrested in 2015,’’ he said, adding, “But Smitha’s disappearance and death remain a mystery.”
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