Amid allegations that their response was not swift, Hyberabad police are now introspecting if they failed to prevent the gory rape and murder of the 27-year-old woman veterinarian.
Section in-charge of the RGIA police station, Venugopal Reddy was the first policeman who interacted with the family. On learning about the incident, he informed the night round officer Satyam, a head constable.
The HC and a Blue Colt patrolling team first went to the Kishanguda toll plaza. As no clue was available there, they drove to the Thondupally toll plaza point where the woman was actually abducted.
Though they examined video footage of the surveillance cameras there, nothing suspicious could be found. There, the Shamshabad Night Division Round Officer Ravi Kumar, sub-inspector of Shamshabad, joined them. The SI told them if the woman was abducted from that point, the crime would come under Shamshabad rural police station, police higher-ups said.
Later, the victim’s family came back to the RGIA police station and left, stating that they would come back to file a formal complaint, Shamshabad ACP Ashok Goud said.
Normally, each police station has two patrol car mobile parties and three other teams moving in the police station area on bikes called Blue Colt teams. Even as five patrolling parties each from the RGIA and the Shamshabad police stations were moving in the area, none could notice the four offenders who lay in wait to assault the woman.
Actually, the quartet admitted to the police they had been consuming liquor before they saw the woman leaving her two-wheeler at Thondupally toll plaza around 6 p.m.
From that time till she was assaulted and murdered around 10.30 p.m., no patrolling party could identify the gang drinking and waiting to commit a grave crime!
After killing the woman, they shifted her body to the lorry’s cabin, drove for over 20 km, dumped the body at an isolated place in Shadnagar and burnt it.
All through this, no police patrol team of the neighbouring Shadnagar police station could get wind of the heinous crime either.
Interestingly, it was a police patrol party which sent away the lorry in which the accused were sitting having parked it on Thondupally toll plaza main road. Acting as if they were complying with police instructions, the gang drove the lorry to the adjacent service road and halted there.
“The gang managed to carry some steel rods in the lorry and unexpectedly got ₹5,000 after selling them,” a police officer said. With that money, they purchased liquor. First, they got a full bottle of whiskey and then brought another half bottle. While getting heavily drunk, the gang saw the woman parking the two-wheeler at the toll plaza.
