Bengaluru, Sep 22: Four men were arrested on Friday in connection with the murder of an income tax officer’s son, whose decomposed body was recovered from a quarry in Bengaluru after he was reported missing 10 days ago, police said.
Sharath N, the son of V Niranjan Kumar, was reported missing on September 12 after he failed to return home at night. He told his parents he was going to meet his friends to show them his new motorcycle.
The 19-year-old’s parents received a video through WhatsApp at around 10pm that day in which he conveyed his abductors’ demand for a ransom of Rs 50 lakh. Sharath informed his father that his kidnappers, who he said looked like terrorists, also threatened to hurt his sister if the ransom was not paid.
Deputy commissioner of police (north sub-division) Chetan Singh Rathore said five people had been identified as the perpetrators, including Sharath’s friend HP Vishal, 20.
Vishal, who works as an agent at the nearby Regional Transport Office, Vinay Prasad (24), a driver; Karan Pai (22), who works at a factory in the Bidadi industrial area, and Vinod Kumar (24), were taken into custody. Shanta Kumar, a driver attached to a taxi-hailing app, is absconding and the police are looking for, Rathore said.
Police said Vishal and his friends, Kumar and Pai, discussed ways to earn quick money to settle down in life. Vishal hit upon the idea of abducting Sharath, a student of automobile engineering at Acharya Institute of Engineering, as he thought his father would pay up to save his only son.
Vishal, who knew Sharath well, used his love for bikes, especially imported superbikes, to lure him into a trap, police said. Vishal called Sharath to an apartment complex in Kengeri on the pretext of letting him ride an imported bike belonging to a friend.
Sharath was then bundled into the car of Prasad, who was drafted into the scheme, police said. However, Rathore said, the abductors panicked as they thought they would be caught by the police if they released Sharath and decided to kill him the same night.
“Sharath is believed to have been strangled in the car around midnight… The accused then decided to dump the body in a lake by tying it to some rocks” Rathore said.
However, on Wednesday, the accused were allegedly caught in a bind as the body began to float at the surface. “They decided to take the body and bury it in a stone quarry nearby,” Rathore said.
“We are awaiting the post-mortem report but it appears that the accused strangled Sharath,” Rathore said.
Source Hindustan Times
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