The Director of Public Prosecutions, undeterred, has just allowed the opening of the Kanakiah case, one of a series of suspicious ‘suicides’ following Soopramanien Kistnen’s initial suicide which – as more and more information started surfacing – turned out to be a cold-blooded, pre-meditated murder, unpunished up until now.   

Pravin Kanakiah ‘committed suicide’ on December 11^th, 2020, less than two months after Kistnen’s ‘suicide’. His case is an even sadder story if there were a measurement for sadness. He had nothing to do with blackmail or rigging contracts and elections. He was, according to our information, an honest officer working at the Procurement Department of the Ministry of Health, a department which handled the contracts administratively, including those given out during the lockdown. According to his wife, “Pravin knew a lot of things, he was very serious and disciplined and if there had been an audit or an inquiry, he would have said everything he knew.”*

Father of a two-year old boy, he woke up one morning on December 11^th, 2020, prepared lunch for himself and his wife, as he usually did, and they drove together to Réduit where they parted ways and each went to work as usual. A normal routine. Except that Pravin Kanakiah didn’t come back home for dinner. His wife later learnt that he had never reached his office either.

The police told the family that someone had seen him take the bus to Souillac and that a witness had seen him at La Roche-qui-Pleure at 10 in the morning. They were later told it was at 5 p.m. in fact. The person who saw him was a cop. Who was the cop who saw him? No, in fact, the police never said it was a cop; it was the public who said that.

Pravin Kanakiah, it would seem, left his car in Réduit and took the bus to go all the way to Souillac where he threw himself off a cliff. There are no witnesses except the cop whose identity we don’t know and no Safe City or private CCTV camera recordings have been seen by the family. Three years later, the Forensic Science Laboratory has not given its findings and the inquiry is ongoing. This was the second case – but by no mean the last – of a suicide pandemic that had suddenly struck a string of civil servants, probably over the procurement scandal.

Three days after Kanakiah’s mysterious ‘suicide’, on December 14^th 2020, another officer’s death came to muddy the waters even more: that of 30-year-old Sarah Boitieux. She was a typist at the Prime Minister’s Office. She died in a very strange way. She hanged herself with a scarf tied to the door handle of her bedroom. The inquiry is ongoing and no hypothesis has been ruled out.

On June 9^th, 2021, Faheza Mooniaruth, another officer at the Ministry of Health ‘committed suicide’ by jumping off the Registrar Building. According to the authorities, the lady decided to go on the roof of the building, climbed on a chair and threw herself off the building. The circumstances were so suspicious that the lady’s death was the object of a Parliamentary Question on July 13^th, 2021.

Minister of Public Service, Administrative and Institutional Reforms Vikram Hurdoyal replied that the officer, whose full name he gave in Parliament, though it went against the Standing Orders, was depressive. He went further and, in an unprecedentedly unbecoming and mean move, he brandished what he claimed were her confidential medical records in the National Assembly. According to the victim’s husband, his wife had no history of any mental health issues and was a happy grandmother who enjoyed the company of her children and grandchildren.

Are these real suicides or a mafia system gone haywire?

My sincere wish is that Rama Valayden’s struggle for answers and the DPP’s willingness to help provide them give the grieving families some closure. We owe them that at least. Though the assassins may continue to walk around free. As is Kistnen’s.

* (l’express 17^th January, 2021)