Nearly five months after Prabha Arun Kumar, a techie from Bengaluru, was stabbed to death in a suburb near Sydney, the Australian police have released new CCTV camera footage showing a man walking near the scene of crime around the same time as the attack took place. The grainy 15-second footage, released by the Westmead police, shows a man walking through the Parramatta Golf Course.
Sydney Morning Herald quoted Detective Acting Inspector Ritchie Sim, who released the footage, as saying, “The person in the footage is the one person we have not been able to identify so far.” The police have appealed to the public to help them identify the man.
“It [the footage] is captured between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. on Saturday the 7th of March, which is ... certainly the time of interest to us regarding the murder,” Mr. Sim has been quoted as saying in the Australian media.
Westmead police, who are probing the case, are also likely to visit Prabha’ hometown as part of the probe. “Considering the nature of the investigation and because it is Prabha’s home [country], it is an obvious line of inquiry. Prabha was here in Australia working [but] the majority of her family are back in India and she only has a stepbrother who lives in western Australia, so it’s a standard line of inquiry for us ... to speak to her family and put together that picture of who Prabha was and the whole victimology side of the investigation,” Mr. Sim was quoted as saying in the Australian media.
Meanwhile, Prashanth Kumar, Prabha’s brother-in-law, expressed dissatisfaction with the probe saying that the investigation had revealed nothing even after nearly five months.
“Not that they are not probing. They are also in constant touch with us through e-mails. The new footage released is also very grainy and helps little for any identification,” he said.