Death by snakebite: new murder weapon of choice in India
- There’s a disturbing new trend in which cold-blooded killers provoke venomous snakes into biting their victims to make their deaths look accidental, courts warn
- In the latest such case, a man starved a cobra for a week before unleashing it on his heavily sedated wife. His previous attempt, with a viper, failed
There’s a new weapon of choice for cold-blooded Indian murderers: venomous snakes.
In the latest case, a Kerala court convicted a wildlife expert on Monday of murdering his wife in May 2020 by putting a cobra – which he had starved for a week to make aggressive – into her bed as she lay in a deep sleep, induced by a sedative he had given her.
The man, known only as Sooraj, 27, had bought the cobra from a snake-charmer about two months after the failure of a previous attempt to kill his wife Uthra. In his previous attempt he had used a viper, but his wife recovered from the bite.
Experts told the court that a natural, or accidental, snakebite typically measured up to 1.8cm but that in this case the bite was nearly 2.8cm. That strongly suggested Sooraj had provoked the snake, they said.
The verdict in Kerala came just days after Supreme Court judges warned of a disturbing “new trend” in Rajasthan, where snakes were being used as murder weapons.