A young female monkey’s corpse was exhumed from the premises of one of India’s most reputed medical colleges in Vellore on Tuesday morning by animal rights activists.
To their horror, the monkey was allegedly brutally killed by four medical students from Christian Medical College in Vellore on Saturday.
This comes just months after two medical students from Chennai were arrested for throwing a dog from a terrace.
The murder came to light when an animal activist Meet Azar from Mumbai got an anonymous call saying a monkey was killed by four MBBS students. The incident took place in the college hostel at around 12:30 pm on Saturday. The body was buried behind the hostel mess.
Azar informed Chennai-based animal activists. Dinesh Baba, Nishanth Nichu, Shravan Krishnan and Antony Rubin went to the college and exhumed the body of the animal from behind the boy’s hostel.
A case under IPC section 429 and various sections of Wildlife Protection Act of 1972 has been registered against Jasper Samuel Sahoo, Rohit Kumar Yenukotti, Arun Loui Sasi Kumar and Alex Chekalayil at Bagayam police station. The four students have been taken for questioning at the police station, said a police source.
Animal activist Shravan Krishnan told The News Minute that over 30 students were witness to the brutal torture and the subsequent murder. “The post mortem showed that the monkey’s neck, hands and legs were tied up with a phone wire. The animal’s knee, neck and ankle were fractured implying that it was thrashed. The worst cruelty that the animal was subjected to, was that it was impaled with a sharp object from behind and it came out from the front,” he said.
According to the versions gathered from the eye-witnesses, Shravan said, “The monkey entered the accused students’ hostel room in the afternoon. The students caught it with a blanket. The female monkey must have been just about a year old and hence not very ferocious. They tied up the monkey’s hands, legs and neck. They took it to the hostel terrace, tied it up and thrashed it brutally. They stabbed the monkey’s back with a sharp object,” he said.
"The college suspended the four students on Wednesday after a preliminary inquiry was conducted by an internal committee," said Anna B Pulimood, CMC principal.
Shravan added that the monkey belonged to the Bonnet Macaque species which is listed in Schedule II, Part I of the Indian Protected Species Act of 1972.