A magistrate’s court at Ranni in Pathanamthitta district on Friday (October 17, 2025) remanded Unnikrishnan Potti, the prime accused in the case concerning the misappropriation of gold-plated copper overlays enveloping the stone carvings and sculptures of the Sabarimala Ayyappa Temple, to the custody of the High Court-appointed Special Investigation Team (SIT) till October 30, 2025.
The magistrate examined the SIT’s request for Mr. Potti’s charge in camera. The judicial officer reportedly gave Mr. Potti 10 minutes to confer with his defence counsel.
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The SIT filed a remand report with the court, detailing the contours of the case, the course of the investigation, and the need for Mr. Potti’s custody to further advance the highly sensitive probe.
Officials said the High Court had ordered the team to keep the investigation under wraps to preclude a parallel public trial by the media, which, the court felt, could prejudice public opinion and impede the natural course of justice. Hence, the SIT submitted the remand report in a sealed cover to the magistrate.
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Officials privy to the SIT probe said the investigators will likely escort Mr. Potti to Bengaluru and Hyderabad to reconstruct the meandering route the temple artefacts took to the restoration factory in Chennai in 2019.
The Travancore Devaswom Board (TDB) had contracted Mr. Potti, a private person, in 2019 to have the gilded moulds deposited at the Chennai factory for restoration to their original golden sheen. (Industrialist Vijay Mallya had donated the gold-plated panels to the temple in 1998.)
It took Mr. Potti’s aides 39 days to hand over the artefacts to the factory, triggering suspicion that the custodians might have replicated the moulds and sold the original casings to some wealthy collector for private worship.
En route to the factory, certain film stars, businesspersons, and celebrities in Karnataka, Telangana, and Tamil Nadu had allegedly chartered the religious objects for private worship at their homes, supposedly in exchange for sizeable cash and gold donations.
The SIT reportedly wanted to examine the transactions, take statements from those who had custody of the artefacts, and unearth any criminality. The High Court had ordered the SIT to hold to account those who had monetised the Ayyappa faith for private profiteering.
It had also directed the SIT to probe whether the suspects had secretly smelted the gilded coverings for the gold and later replicated the originals in copper to cover up the alleged crime.
The SIT was also reportedly poised to issue summons to at least nine TDB officials, including serving and retired persons, named as accused in the case. It was examining why some TDB officials had certified the gilded coverings as made of pure copper before dispatch to Chennai for restoration work.
Meanwhile, the Nair Service Society (NSS) has suspended Murari Babu, an accused TDB official, from its primary membership. Mr. Babu is currently the vice-president of the NSS’s Perunna taluk union.
Published – October 17, 2025 01:42 pm IST
