Prime accused Savad, who chopped Professor Joseph's hand using an axe in 2010, was nabbed from Mattannur in Kannur.
A file picture of Joseph with wife Salomi, who committed suicide unable to withstand the sufferings.
Thirteen years after cadres of the now-banned Popular Front of India (PFI) chopped off the right hand of TJ Joseph, then professor and head of the Malayalam Department at Newman College in Thodupuzha for alleged blasphemy, the prime accused has been nabbed by the National Investigating Agency (NIA) from Mattannur near Kannur.
The arrested PFI activist has been identified as 38-year-old M Savad, a native of Nooleli near Asamannur in Ernakulam district.
NIA sources told South First on Wednesday, 10 January, that Savad was taken into custody from his rented house at Berakam near Mattannur, a little away from the Kannur International Airport, following a tip-off late afternoon on Tuesday.
He had apparently been living there for months — with his wife and two kids, both aged under five — under the fake name Shajahan, and working as a carpenter.
Before moving to Berakom, he stayed in another locality named Vilakode. He was introverted and hardly engaged in any conversation with neighbours.
Officials said he learnt carpentry after going underground. There were even speculations that he moved to Syria and worked with the Islamic State group.
After his arrest, Savad was taken to Kochi, and he has already undergone an initial interrogation at the NIA office in the city. By evening, he will be produced before the special NIA court.
M Savad. File picture
As per the prosecution charges, Savad fled from the scene of the incident on 4 July, 2010, with the small axe he used to chop off the hand of the professor and, till now, had been absconding without any communication with fellow accused or the PFI leadership.
Agencies have failed so far to find the axe he used to commit the crime.
Though there was initial information about his movement from Thodupuzha in the Idukki district to Aluva after committing the crime, no credible details of his whereabouts have been available since then.
There was information at one point that he was hiding in Bengaluru. Later, the NIA and local police were told that he was spotted in some Gulf countries.
The NIA had promised a cash reward of ₹10 lakh to those who provided information about his whereabouts.
The incident occurred in July 2010 and, since then, the sensational case that shocked the whole nation has remained alive, with courts punishing most of the other accused and directing the investigators to speed up the process of finding Savad.
The attack occurred while Joseph was returning home with his family after attending Sunday Mass at a church close to his residence located between Thodupuzha and Muvattupuzha. The attackers pulled the professor out of the vehicle, assaulted him, and then chopped off his right hand.
According to the initial probe by the police, the accused wanted to kill Joseph for what they deemed were “derogatory religious remarks” in a question paper he set for the BCom semester examination at Newman College in Thodupuzha.
The prosecution said the attackers comprised a group of seven people who had pulled the professor out of his vehicle and assaulted him. The main accused, Savad, chopped off his right hand.
A special NIA court awarded life sentences to three people in the case last year. The second accused, Sajil (36), the third accused, MK Nasar (46) and the fifth accused, KA Najeeb (42), are the three people undergoing life terms now.
A three-year jail term was awarded to the three other convicts — PP Moideen Kunju (60), MK Naushad (48), and PM Ayoob (48). Five others accused of conspiring in the crime were acquitted for want of evidence.
When South First contacted Professor Joseph on Wednesday, he termed the arrest of Savad “a victory for the country’s criminal investigation process”. However, he added that he felt no personal satisfaction in the arrest of a person who chopped off his hand, inspired by religious extremism.
Even when the other accused in the case were convicted, the retired professor declared that he bore no ill will against his attackers, whose actions led to a series of unfortunate developments in his life, which included impairing the functioning of the reattached hand, excommunication from the Church to which he was affiliated, sacking from his job, and the suicide of his wife.
Joseph said he firmly believed that his life was not destroyed by what happened 13 years ago, but admitted that it did undergo some changes, and he did suffer some losses.
The professor, who wrote an award-winning autobiography using his left hand, told South First then that those who were caught and convicted in the case “were only the weapons”, and the actual culprits behind the act were yet to be found.
“I have never believed that punishing an accused amounts to justice dispensation to the victim. It is a mistaken belief. So, whether they were convicted or acquitted, I do not care either way,” he had said.
“They are victims of their beliefs, which led them to attack me, and now they are facing the consequences for the same,” he said.
If this belief system did not change, such incidents might occur in the future, said Joseph when South First asked him about the intolerance that propelled the heinous act against him.
According to the prosecution, Joseph set the “controversial” question in a paper for an internal exam in Malayalam for second-semester BCom students after selecting a passage from a book on cinema by fellow CPI(M) activist and award-winning filmmaker PT Kunju Muhammed. That was in March 2010.
In the controversial question, a person with schizophrenia asks Padachon — the Malayalam substitute for Allah or God — a stupid question. In response, God calls the man the son of a dog, a common insult in Malayalam. Dogs, however, are considered unclean in Islam.
Though it was a passage taken from the book by Kunju Muhammed, the man speaking to God was unnamed in the original text. The man was named Muhammed in the examination paper set by Joseph.
Professor T J Joseph
This led to the interpretation that the Muslim community and its central text, the Quran, had been disrespected by the Christian professor, and that too before several students hailing from different religious backgrounds. Some people cooked up a story of blasphemy around the question paper and leaked it to a section of the media.
A prominent Malayalam television channel, which ceased operations four years ago for want of funds, telecast a sensational “exclusive” claiming the Muhammed mentioned in the question paper was the Islamic Prophet and that the Christian professor had willfully engaged in character assassination of the founder of Islam.
The fake news led to large-scale protests across the state, and the PFI and other radical Islamic outfits were furious.
Joseph told South First earlier that he had no clue that the portion used in the question paper would be considered blasphemous. He said he just explored the satiric element in the text.
He also said the name Muhammed was chosen because it was also the name of the author of the essay, Kunju Muhammed.
Moreover, the book was on the recommended reading list for Malayalam graduate and postgraduate students.
After the question paper courted controversy, Joseph had to go underground. He had to run from one city to the next to dodge arrest. Though he was eventually arrested at a Muslim-run lodge in Palakkad, he was soon released on bail.
But Joseph had no job to return to, as the Church had instructed the college to dismiss him.
In the subsequent months, he had to endure three attempts on his life.
The fourth time, Joseph was returning home after church services on 4 July, 2010, with his mother and sister when the criminal gang waylaid his car.
As the vehicle was locked from the inside, the attackers broke a glass window and pulled Joseph out. Then they assaulted him and severed his hand.
The hand was reattached through a complex medical procedure within hours of the incident, and the inhuman act by radical Islamic elements elicited wide condemnation and caused a sensation at the national and international levels.
During the trial’s first phase, the court completely exonerated Joseph of the charge of blasphemy. It stated unequivocally that the Muhammed he mentioned in the college examination question paper had nothing to do with the Islamic prophet.
However, a letter circulated among the laity in 120 churches around Joseph’s residence — and read out at Sunday Mass — said the assault did not absolve Joseph of his wrongs, such as insulting another religion.
The litigation Joseph initiated against his college to get re-employed ran for four years without reaching any resolution and severely dented his family savings.
As a result, his wife Salomi went into depression and ended her life in their house in March 2014, exactly a week before Joseph was officially due to retire.
It was her suicide that caused public anger to be directed at the college, and finally, the Church allowed him to return to work for just one day: The day of his retirement.
That day’s work protected him from a unilateral termination and helped him access retirement benefits. Using the retirement benefits, he renovated the house and ensured his son and daughter had a better education.
Though his right hand was reattached, Joseph could not use it freely. He nevertheless wrote the manuscript of the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award-winning book for the Best Autobiography in Malayalam using his left hand.
Joseph documented the incident and his emotions in his memoir Atthupokatha Ormakal, translated roughly as “Memories that Cannot be Chopped Off”. Penguin Random House India recently released its English version, A Thousand Cuts.
The 431-page book, which has become a publishing sensation in Malayalam, is a scathing account of not just Islamic obscurantism but also of the dishonesty and betrayal committed against him by the Catholic denomination that runs Newman College.
“Islamic fanatics attacked me only once. But the Christian denomination to which I belonged did it repeatedly. They ruined the whole of my life since the incident by excommunicating me and terminating me from the job without citing any valid reason,” he said in his book.
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