iNDICA News Bureau-
The corpses of a couple who had returned from the U.S. Saturday and were murdered at their Mylapore, Chennai, home and buried at their farmhouse in Nemmilichery, near Mamallapuram, on the East Coast Road, were exhumed by the Chengalpattu collectorate Sunday, The Hindu reported.
The Mylapore police station, which is investigating the murder, requested the district officials to exhume the bodies which have since been sent for a post-mortem examination.
Srikanth, 58, and his wife Anuradha, 52, had returned in the pre-dawn hours of Saturday after spending six months in the U.S. with their daughter Sunantha. They were picked up by their driver Krishna and driven to their house in Dwaraka Colony, Mylapore.
According to TheNewsMinute.com, Srikanth was a former chief financial officer at Jio Infocomm and also worked for Polaris before becoming head of corporate finance at Infibeam, a Gujarat-based firm.
Explaining the sequence of events that led to the arrests of Krishna, a Nepali citizen, and his accomplice, Ravi Rai, a Darjeeling native, Additional Commissioner of Police (Chennai South) N Kannan said the force was alerted after Sashwath, the couple’s son, and Sunantha failed to reach their parents’ mobile phones.
As Krishna was being evasive, they requested a relative living in Adyar to check on their parents. The relative found the house broken into and the car missing. He immediately called the police control room, which alerted the Mylapore police station.
A team reached the Mylapore house and found the locker empty. The floors had also been cleaned with disinfectant. Learning that the couple had a farmhouse near Mamallapuram and their car was missing, another team was sent there.
At the farmhouse, police found blood stains in several places and a freshly covered pit. They also found the couple’s mobile phones and partially burnt flight tickets.
With Krishna nowhere to be found, a search party was deployed and the police began retrieving records from Srikanth’s mobile phone. That’s when they found messages from FASTag, the automated national toll system, that showed the car had crossed a toll gate in Andhra Pradesh on the Chennai-Kolkata national highway. CCTV footage from the toll booth confirmed the car was headed north.
The police then informed their Andhra Pradesh counterparts who intercepted the car in Ongole and nabbed Krishna and Ravi Rai, who were heading to Nepal.
Displaying the gold jewellery, silver articles, laptops and mobile phones that police said were recovered from the suspects, Additional Commissioner Kannan said Krishna had plotted to kill them after learning of a property deal worth ₹40 crore by Srikanth a few months ago. For some reason he thought the deal was in cash and the money was stored in the locker in the Mylapore house.
“The murders were premeditated,” the officer said. “When the couple returned from the U.S. early on Saturday, the accused and his accomplice Ravi Rai, from Darjeeling, murdered them with a log.”
However, when the suspects opened the locker, they found only gold and jewellery, no money. So, they picked up 1,000 gold sovereigns and over 50 kilos of silver articles, he said.
They then used the couple’s car to move the bodies to the farmhouse and buried them there.
The officer claimed that Krishna, who lived in the outhouse of the victims’ house in Mylapore, had kept the pit ready at the farmhouse for this purpose. He also removed the CCTV cameras and digital video recorder in the Mylapore house once the couple boarded the flight back home. Police said he waited till then because he knew the couple used to monitor the CCTV feed from the U.S.
According to the police, the murder took place within an hour of the couple’s return to their home and the suspects were nabbed five hours later.
