The police team probing the Abhimanyu murder case is likely to record the arrest of four more persons in connection with the case.
According to sources, the City police rounded up 22 persons, all activists of the Social Democratic Party of India (SDPI) and the Campus Front of India (CFI), in connection with the case. Of this, at least four persons are directly linked to the crime, they said.
The investigation team has identified the assailant who stabbed the SFI worker on the college premises earlier this week. The sources said verification of CCTV footage showed the assailant, a stocky person wearing a dark blue shirt, walking down the road with a sharp-edged weapon in his hand.
According to police, of the 15-member squad directly involved in the attack, 14 were from outside the campus. They had visited the campus around 9.30 p.m the same day, about three hours before the attack. The probe team has arraigned Muhammed, a third-year undergraduate student at the college who led the squad, as first accused in the case. The police have also identified the presence of one more person bearing the same name among the remaining accused.
As per the remand report of the first three accused, Muhammad called up the other accused over phone and they came to the location with weapons and thrashed the SFI volunteers and stabbed Abhimanyu who tried to stop them.
Meanwhile, Saifuddin, the Popular Front of India activist who was arrested in connection with the case recently, was produced before a magistrate and remanded in judicial custody. Earlier, the police had picked up three persons — Bilal Saji, Farook Amani, and Riyas Hussain — from a camp, ‘Cochin House’, run by CFI activists at Ernakulam North during a raid. The police took the three into custody till July 7 for further interrogation.
Preventive arrest
Several PFI and SDPI workers, including 68 persons from the Ernakulam Rural district, have been taken into preventive arrest in connection with the case. As many as 57 cases have been registered against these people, who included 25 leaders and 38 workers of various organisations, the police said.