The Bangalore police have formed three teams to investigate the >murder of an IT professional from Coimbatore outside a hotel in South End Circle in the early hours of January 1. There are still no clear leads to why 24-year-old Karthik Vishnu was murdered though five of his friends have been questioned since Tuesday night.
Karthik, who was partying on New Year’s Eve with a group of friends — eight boys and two girls — from Coimbatore, Chennai and Mumbai, was found dead with stab injuries outside the hotel. Friends were picked up for questioning based on the CCTV footage that showed him going into the hotel with them. The police on Wednesday said that the stab wounds indicated they were inflicted with rage. The murder weapon is yet to be recovered.
Row between friends
Police said one of the friends had brought along a girlfriend and was dancing with her. Karthik tried to dance with her, which triggered a row between the friends. The hotel’s bouncers intervened and threw out the group after which Karthik was murdered around 1 a.m.
Sources said while he was at the party, Karthik received an SMS from a girl and this is also being investigated. Though the hotel’s security guard claimed Karthik fell off an autorickshaw, police said that this is yet to be confirmed.
Pall of gloom
Meanwhile, relatives of Karthik, who is a freelance software professional from Mathamputhur near Tirupur in Tamil Nadu, are still dazed over the turn of events, our Tirupur reporter adds.
A pall of gloom descended on Mathamputhur on Wednesday with neighbours and relatives describing him as a “soft-spoken, well mannered youth”. Little did they realise that the young man who left for Bangalore on December 27 for a professional assignment would never return. “We were informed of the murder only at 7 a.m. on Tuesday by some of his friends,” said Karthik’s brother-in-law R. Sekar, adding that the Karnataka police had not revealed any details to the family even till Wednesday evening.
A relative, who rushed to Bangalore on hearing the news, told this paper that the video footage at the hotel had Karthik dancing with his friends, who included a serving Defence personnel, without any untoward incident. “This means that the murder took place minutes after they came off the party floor,” he said.
