During 1970-72, a gang, posing as Customs officers, kidnapped and murdered seven gold merchants and hawala operators after whisking them away in the name of inquiry from lodges in Chennai. The Bollywood hit Special 26 was based on the 1987 Opera House heist in Mumbai. The Akshay Kumar-starrer, released in 2013, was about a gang of conmen posing as CBI or Income Tax officers and targetting gold merchants in different parts of the country in the late 1980s.
A decade before these incidents, Tamil Nadu witnessed a series of gruesome murders involving a gang posing as Customs officials. The murders, which came to be known as ‘visha oosi’ (poisonous injection) cases, occurred during 1970-72 in Madras. The gang gathered intelligence from room-boys of lodges around Chennai Central where frequent travellers, hawala operators, and gold merchants stayed. After identifying the target, the suspects would conduct a raid, claiming to be Customs officials, and whisk the victim away in a car.
A pharmacist’s idea
With a pharmacist ideating the crime and arranging logistics, the accused had easy access to sedatives, syringe and other surgical equipment. They would first inject the victim with a heavy dose of Pethidine (an opiod, pain medication) to immobilise him. If he survived, they would murder him in the car and abandon the naked body, mostly along the Tamil Nadu-Andhra Pradesh border. With each murder, the conmen made good money and started preparing for the next hit. What appeared to be an innocuous man-missing case unfolded into a series of spine-chilling murders. In his report, Murder Most Foul, the then Inspector-General of Police, F.V. Arul, described the case as a ruthless execution of a plot which can hardly find a parallel in the history of crime. What started as a routine investigation into a man-missing case “suddenly exploded into an exposition of a series of the most gruesome murders perpetrated by a gang of thugs who were devoid of the least compunction for human life”. Though the gang managed to get away with a few kidnap and murder cases, leaving the police clueless, the mysterious disappearance of Thaika Thambi of Kilakarai in Ramanathapuram district from a lodge in Chennai on October 24, 1972 was the beginning of the endgame. Thambi’s family lodged a complaint with the Seven Wells police. With not much progress in the case, the investigation was transferred to the Crime Branch-CID a couple of months later.
The first clue
Investigation led the police to Mohammed Thambi, a conch seller of Kilakarai, who was often seen in the company of Thaika Thambi. He confessed to having agreed to a deal with one Kadar of Chennai, who offered a good cash reward for giving a tip-off about gold smugglers. Knowing that Thaika Thambi was into gold smuggling, Mohammed Thambi came to Chennai and showed Thaika Thambi to Kadar when he was boarding a train to Bangalore. Little did he know that the gang was present at the scene before splitting into two groups – one boarded the train and the other headed to Bangalore in a car — targetting Thaika Thambi.
The gang tracked the movement of the target there and pounced on him at the opportune time. Thaika Thambi was forced into a car and injected with a lethal dose of Pethidine. After he died, the gang dumped his body along the roadside and escaped with 40 gold biscuits that were in his possession. The police lost no time in tracking Kadar who had crucial inputs which led investigators to the prime suspect, Vaitheeswaran, who ran a pharmacy at George Town, and so-called Customs officials: Parthasarathy, Venugopal, Ayub Khan, and others.
The interrogation of the suspects led to the detection of the other cases. Vaitheeswaran was the architect of the modus operandi and others agreed to his evil design to make quick money. The cash and other valuables that they looted with each murder, which was made to look like a suicide, and the slow police action only emboldened them to look for more targets. The first of the victims was Vadivullan Chettiar of Siruvayal who stayed in a lodge at Periamet. One of the room boys, brainwashed by the gang, informed them that the target could be in possession of huge cash. The ‘Customs’ officials came the same night and took him away in the name of an ‘inquiry’. They forced him to consume an excessive dose of sleeping pills. After an hour, Vadivullan became unconscious. The gang abandoned him on the city’s outskirts and escaped with ₹1.5 lakh and a wrist watch. Passers-by noticed him lying along the road and arranged to shift him to the government hospital where he died after a couple of days. It was initially thought to be a case of suicide.
The next victim was Sahul Hameed of Malaysia who was robbed in a similar fashion and his body was strung up from a tree near the Andhra Pradesh border. One Dakshinamurthy, who informed the police about the lavish spending of Venugopal, was murdered and his body was set ablaze near Chittoor. The other victims were Buhari Thambi, Sadak Ibrahim, and Mohammed Sadik. All the three were killed with lethal doses of Pethidine, stripped naked and their bodies were dumped along the Andhra Pradesh border.
The details of the crime and how it was systematically executed were revealed by Vaitheeswaran to the CB-CID. The other gang members were either arrested or they surrendered in court. Investigators roped in forensic experts to establish the identity of the victims based on available evidence.
The trial in the case commenced at a sessions court in June 1974. A total of 263 witnesses were examined, 672 exhibits were filed, and 1,087 material objects were placed. The judge sentenced Vaitheeswaran, Parthasarathy, Lakshmanan, and Kannan to death and awarded life imprisonment to Dawood, Ayub Khan, Majeed, and Gopal. Years later, the death sentence of the four convicts was commuted to life imprisonment by the Supreme Court.
