Police in Kerala have arrested eight people for allegedly killing a Gulf-based Malayali after he embraced Islam.
P Faisal, 32, who worked as a driver in Riyadh, was killed last week while on his way to the railway station to collect his father-in-law in Kodinhi village in the predominantly Muslim district of Malappuram.
He was on vacation in Kerala.
Police said the eight suspects, including his close relatives, belonged to the Hindu rightwing Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological guardian of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
Three others, allegedly members of a professional hit gang, are still at large.
The police said Faisal, who was attracted to Islam while working in Saudi Arabia, had received death threats after he got his family also converted to his new faith.
“They have admitted to murdering him for converting to Islam,” a police officer said.
The police, who found his body by the roadside on November 19, say the gang, including his brother-in-law and another relative, waylaid and stabbed him to death around 5am.
He was to leave for Saudi Arabia the next day and perform Umrah.
The police said his relatives had threatened to kill him if he did not revert to Hinduism and stop inviting others to his new faith.
A 19-member police investigating team zeroed in on the suspects after questioning four of his close relatives who admitted threatening him several times.
The statements of Meenakshi, the mother of Faisal (Anish Kumar before conversion) also provided vital clues.
Faisal was pulled out of an auto-rickshaw just 2km from his rented house where he lived with his family and brutally killed, the police said.
His mother told the police that Faisal embraced Islam under no compulsion or enticement. The villagers have now adopted his family, and the Dubai-based Kerala Muslim Cultural Centre (KMCC) has offered to buy a home for them.
Muslim leaders who visited his family and offered prayers also ensured that there were no retaliatory attacks which could disrupt communal harmony in the village famed for its unusually large number of twin births.
They also held an all-party meeting, with the participation of police and other government officials, and called for maintaining calm.
Faisal belonged to a Nair family.
Faisal: murdered
