Nayana Surya death: Failure to collect fingerprints, send clothes for forensic exam to limit scope of reinvestigation

Thiruvananthapuram: A murder cloud hangs on the 2019 mysterious death of budding film director Nayana Surya (28). The local police which had carried out the initial probe apparently bungled and now a reinvestigation has been ordered after the autopsy report that her friends got hold of point to murder. However, the new probe to be carried out by the Kochi Police Commissioner is unlikely to be easy as crucial evidences would be lost by now.

While the case is probed afresh with a murder angle, another autopsy can’t be done as her body was consigned to flames. Her original autopsy report mentioned internal bleeding, but the police had failed to probe the reasons for the same during the initial investigation three years ago.

The cops had then failed to collect the mobile phone call records of Nayana, which is also affecting the fresh police probe. This cannot be retrieved now as telecom companies keep it for a limited time.

Similarly, the initial probe team failed to send her clothes for forensic examination and didn’t collect fingerprints in the room and on her body. Its finding that the room was locked from the inside is also factually wrong. The police had then arrived at the conclusion that her death was due to acute illness without taking any expert advice.

The fresh investigation is progressing with the cops suspecting the murder angle, chiefly due to the grievous injuries that she suffered in her lower abdomen and neck, as reported in her autopsy report. Though there were several critical lapses during the initial investigation by the Museum Police, no probe has been ordered yet into the role of the officers concerned. City Police Commissioner Y H Nagarajan, in his report submitted to Additional Director General of Police (ADGP) Ajithkumar, too cited the huge lapse in the earlier probe conducted by the Museum Police.

Earlier, Nayana’s relatives and friends had lodged a complaint stating that the initial police team failed to carry out a fair probe into her death.

Nayana, who worked under the late film director Lenin Rajendran for nearly 10 years, was found in an unconscious state in her house at Althara Nagar in Thiruvananthapuram on February 23, 2019. Though the postmortem report pointed out that she had suffered injuries, the cops failed to investigate the same then.