⏳ The Long Shadow of Anchal: AI Closes a 19-Year-Old Case That Shocked a Nation

In the quiet pursuit of justice, time is often the most formidable opponent. With every passing year, memories fade, witnesses disappear, and evidence grows cold.

But in a recent, groundbreaking turn of events, the enduring power of Artificial Intelligence (AI), coupled with the relentless dedication of law enforcement, has proven that the truth, no matter how deeply buried, will always find its way out.

This is the astonishing story of how a triple murder case from 2006—the brutal killing of a young mother and her 17-day-old twin babies in Anchal, Kollam, Kerala—was finally solved, not by a conventional detective’s hunch, but by an algorithm.

The Perfect Crime and The Vanishing Act

The original crime, which took place in February 2006, was a horrifying tragedy. A young woman, Renjini, and her twin newborn daughters were found brutally murdered.

The prime suspects were two men: Divil Kumar, who was allegedly in a relationship with Renjini and had denied paternity of the twins, and his friend, Rajesh P. Both men were personnel in the Indian Army.

The motive was chillingly clear. Renjini had sought a paternity test through the State Women’s Commission, forcing Divil to confront his responsibilities.

The conspiracy that followed was cold-blooded. Allegedly, Divil and Rajesh took leave from their duties, and Rajesh, under the false name ‘Anil Kumar,’ had befriended Renjini and her mother to familiarize himself with the location and her movements.

On the fateful day, he ensured Renjini’s mother was away, securing the birth certificates for the very babies he was allegedly about to help murder.

They committed the heinous act, brutally ending three innocent lives, and then simply disappeared, vanishing into the fabric of the vast country.

For 19 years, this case remained a ghost. The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) took over the case, and both men were declared ‘deserters’ by the Army and proclaimed offenders by the court. But all leads seemed to have run into a brick wall.

The killers were presumed to be anywhere, possibly even abroad, and the chances of finding them dwindled with each passing year. The tragedy had become a cold, painful file.

A High-Tech Gambit: The Role of ADGP Manoj Abraham

Fast forward to the present. The truth, which had been hiding in plain sight, was about to be dragged into the light.

This breakthrough began with a strategic decision by Kerala’s Additional Director General of Police (ADGP) Manoj Abraham, whose team was revisiting old cases using modern technical intelligence.

The challenge was immense: how do you find two men who are not only actively hiding but whose appearance has naturally changed over nearly two decades? The answer lay in a radical new approach for Indian law enforcement: Artificial Intelligence-powered age-progression.

The technical intelligence wing took the only existing asset—old photographs of Rajesh and Divil—and fed them into sophisticated AI software.

This AI was tasked with the unimaginable: to predict, with various realistic changes, how the suspects would look today, accounting for factors like weight gain, receding hairlines, and general aging. This process generated several probable ‘current’ images.

This move was a massive, technological leap. It transformed grainy, dated police photos into a suite of digital blueprints for the 21st-century manhunt. It was, in essence, the police department pressing their own ‘reset button’ on a case that had long defied traditional methods.

The Digital Breadcrumb: A Facebook Wedding Photo

With the AI-generated images in hand, the police began the meticulous process of cross-referencing them with millions of photos available on social media platforms, including Facebook. They were looking for a match, a digital breadcrumb that would connect the past to the present.

The system eventually flagged a promising lead: an image on a Facebook profile. This photo—a wedding picture—had a high-percentage similarity (reportedly over 90%) to one of the AI-aged images of the suspect Rajesh. The digital puzzle pieces were finally clicking into place.

The man in the photo was identified as ‘Praveen Kumar’ in Puducherry. The name was new, but the face was a striking match for the aged image of the absconding Rajesh. This crucial intelligence was immediately relayed to the CBI, leading to the deployment of an arrest team.

The Chilling Double Life

What investigators discovered next was a testament to the chilling audacity of the criminals. The arrest of ‘Praveen Kumar’ alias Rajesh quickly led the CBI to the second suspect, Divil Kumar, who was living under the new name ‘Vishnu.’

For 19 years, these two men had been living a complete, picture-perfect lie. They had both settled down in Puducherry, having completely changed their identities.

They had started a successful interior design business and, in a horrifying twist of irony, had both married schoolteachers.

They had built new lives, new families, even having children of their own—all while the memory of the three lives they took remained an open, agonizing wound for the victims’ family. To all who knew them, ‘Praveen’ and ‘Vishnu’ were respectable, unremarkable members of their community.

The contrast is stunning: on one side, the gruesome reality of the 2006 triple murder; on the other, the carefully constructed facade of domestic bliss and professional success. It underscores a terrifying truth: a monster can be a neighbor, a husband, or a father.

Justice Delivered and the Future of Policing

The arrests of Praveen Kumar alias Rajesh and Vishnu alias Divil Kumar finally brought closure to a case that had haunted the Kerala police force for two decades.

They were produced before a court in Kochi and remanded to judicial custody, with the CBI seeking their custody for further investigation.

Beyond the closure for the victim’s family, this case marks a pivotal moment in Indian criminal justice. It is one of the earliest, and most high-profile, examples of the successful use of Artificial Intelligence to crack a long-dormant cold case.

It highlights the potential for AI as an invaluable tool, capable of transcending the limitations of time and natural human aging to serve as the long arm of the law.

This technological victory is a powerful message to those who believe they can escape justice by simply waiting it out. The age of perfect anonymity may be drawing to a close.

The convergence of determination, human intelligence, and artificial intelligence has proven that when it comes to the most heinous crimes, no amount of time or meticulous planning can erase a killer’s face from the relentless memory of the machine.

The truth, hidden for 19 years, has finally been exposed, thanks to the very technology that defines our modern era.