Watch: Kerala police tries to reconstruct woman’s murder using cobra and dummy

Kerala police used a real snake and a dummy to reconstruct the crime scene of the 2020 Uthra murder case. The video of the demonstration, which was carried out last year, was released to the media on 26 August. It is supposed to be crucial to the investigation.

Twenty-five-year-old Uthra was allegedly murdered by her husband in May last year. The husband gave her sleeping pills before planting an India cobra to bite and kill her. Police had arrested the husband last year on suspicion of murder. It was alleged that this was the second time he had tried to kill her using a snake. According to the investigation team, the husband had earlier used a viper to kill Uthra. She survived the attempt and was recovering at her parents’ house when she was bitten by the cobra. Police have stated that deliberately using a snake twice to kill a person amounts to “brutal murder”. The video released by the police shows a cobra being released near the dummy. Manish Kumar, the Chairman of the Mahindra Wildlife Foundation revealed in an interview that, the investigators dropped the snake on the dummy twice or thrice, “but it didn’t do anything, and tried to hide out". The snake did not initially bite the dummy, despite repeated provocations by the investigators. The investigators tried to make the snake attack by tying a piece of meat to the dummy and waving it in front of the reptile. The cobra finally bit the mannequin after several attempts. The officers measured the width of the bites A financial angle was suspected as the motive behind the murder. Uthra’s parents revealed the husband had received a dowry of 98 sovereigns of gold jewellery. They have also levied charges of domestic violence against him.