Kanchi Shankaracharya Jayendra Saraswati's deputy, Vijyendra Saraswati, was arrested on Monday and remanded to judicial custody for 15 days. He will be lodged in Chennai central jail.
The arrest was made at the Kanchi mutt at around 1800 IST.
A large contingent of policemen were present both inside and outside the mutt premises when the junior seer was taken
into custody.
Also see: Who was Sankararaman? | The Complete Coverage
A police team led by Kancheepuram Superintendent of Police K Premkumar, who heads a special investigation team on the murder case, took the 35-year-old seer wading through a crowd of devotees from the front door of the mutt
to a waiting police van.
The arrest of Vijyendra Saraswati, who had been holding fort ever since the arrest of the senior Shankaracharya on
on November 11 in Karimanagar in Andhra Pradesh, came just seven hours after the Supreme Court ordered that Jayendra Saraswati be released on bail with the condition that he will not not go to the mutt till the police files the chargesheet in the Sankararaman murder case.
Also see: SC grants bail to Shankaracharya
Vijyendra, who was initiated into sainthood in 1983, has already once been summoned and questioned in the case by the SIT.