On Monday, the Kerala Assembly disqualified ruling alliance legislator Antony Raju after he was sentenced to a three-year jail term for allegedly tampering with evidence in a 1990 drug case. The piece of evidence in question was an Australian man’s underwear that suddenly wouldn’t fit — forcing a court to acquit.
Raju, who served as transport minister in the first half of the current LDF government’s tenure, was practising as a lawyer in Thiruvananthapuram at the time of the case. This is how the case’s threads were finally untangled 36 years on.
It began with the arrest of an Australian man, Andrew Salvatore Cervelli, who landed in Thiruvananthapuram airport from Mumbai on April 4, 1990 with two packets of hashish (55 grams and 6.5 grams) concealed in his underwear. The underwear was seized and produced before a judicial magistrate court in Thiruvananthapuram. Raju, then a junior lawyer, was a counsel for the accused. A district sessions court, which later took up the case, awarded Cervelli a 10-year sentence and a Rs 1 lakh fine.
The Australian man appealed before the High Court, pointing out that the lower court had not considered his request for a “practical test” — that is, whether the underwear even fit him.
It turned out that it didn’t. The High Court registrar noted that “in spite of repeated attempts”, Cervelli found it impossible to pull the underwear up his thighs. The High Court set aside Cervelli’s conviction in 1991 and he returned to Australia a free man.
But Cervelli’s lawyer, Raju, wasn’t going to wriggle out of the situation as easily — the court observed that there was a strong possibility that the underwear had been planted.
The High Court vigilance informed the Thiruvananthapuram district judge that the underwear involved in the case had been substituted. The district court official moved a complaint, leading to the registration of an FIR in 1994 under the IPC Sections related to cheating and disappearance of evidence.
Raju, meanwhile, was elected as Trivandrum West MLA in 1996 under the Kerala Congress, a regional party. He was again elected as Thiruvananthapuram MLA in 2021, this time as a member of the Janadhipathya Kerala Congress, a splinter group of Kerala Congress.
While police team after police team probed the matter, a charge sheet was submitted only in 2006. The charge sheet found that the underwear had indeed been tampered with — by Raju, aided by a clerk named K Jose at the Judicial First Class Magistrate court in Thiruvananthapuram.
As the accused’s lawyer, Raju got the garment released from the court. On August 9, 1990, Jose handed over the underwear to Raju. Despite being a key piece of evidence, it remained in Raju’s possession for four months. During this time, he allegedly altered the garment so it would not fit and returned it as if it were original evidence on December 5, 1990. The magistrate court forwarded the altered underwear to the sessions court, from where it reached the High Court.
Forensic experts found a number of factors that suggested that the underwear had been altered. A label — declaring that the garment’s size was 85-90 cm — appeared to have been restitched onto a small piece of the original label. Some parts of the fabric were lighter in colour and more worn than the rest. And the fibres in some parts were more frayed and disturbed when compared to similar folded regions.
Based on the police report, the district court in Thiruvananthapuram ordered that a case be registered against Raju and clerk Jose for tampering with material evidence.
Police submitted the chargesheet in the magistrate court in 2013, but the case was deferred several times and remained pending for years. Later, Raju and Jose approached the High Court, which quashed the proceedings against them in 2022. In November 2024, acting on a public interest litigation, the Supreme Court restored the proceedings, observing that the case emanated from nearly two decades earlier, and directed the magistrate court to conclude the trial within a year.
On January 3, the magistrate court convicted Raju and Jose. An apparent boast by Raju during the trial at the sessions court all those years back also came back to bite him. He had allegedly told the investigating officer that a “bomb” had been planted in the case, that it would explode once the trial was over, and that the case would be finished. The police officer had, at the time, informed the prosecutor who had initially brushed it aside. This testimony by the investigating officer at the magistrate court proved crucial.
The magistrate court, though, allowed both Raju and Jose bail for a month, which will enable them to appeal against the verdict.
Curated by Dr. Elena Rodriguez
