The Criminal Investigation Department has cracked an 11-year-old case of murder of a woman, wherein her husband, who turned out to be innocent, was arrested but later not charge-sheeted. It has now come to light that the deceased was also gang-raped before being murdered. CID has now arrested and charge-sheeted three men in the case for murder and gang rape.
The case dates back to February 2013, when Balakrishna Pai, an employee of Canara Bank, Mahalakshmi Layout branch and a resident of Sanjaynagar, lodged a missing person complaint with Sanjaynagar Police after his wife, Vijaya Pai, working at a private firm in Electronics City, did not return from work. Days later, Chikkajala police discovered the body of a woman in a eucalyptus grove in their limits. Balakrishna Pai identified the body as that of his wife.
However, his ordeal had only begun. Sanjaynagar police arrested him, accusing him of murdering his wife. He was in judicial custody for 90 days, but the police did not file a chargesheet against him as they did not find evidence against him. He was discharged from the case, and the police filed a “C” closure report saying the murder case had gone cold. However, Balakrishna Pai challenged the closure report in the case in the High Court of Karnataka and sought further probe. The High Court handed over the case to CID.
The probe into the case did not achieve any breakthrough for a few years, but it picked up recently after a review of pending cases. Sources in CID said a reexamination of all the evidence collected by the local police, including a Call Details Record (CDR) of a few numbers the day she went missing, led them to a breakthrough. This led the sleuths to one Deepak C., whose involvement they suspected. His detailed interrogation led to the case being cracked, police said.
CID has now arrested and charge-sheeted Narasimhamurthy, who was the manager of Canara Bank, Mahalakshmi Layout branch, in 2013, the same branch where Balakrishna Pai was an employee, and his associate Hariprasad N., apart from Deepak C. The trio allegedly gang-raped the deceased Vijaya Pai, killed her and disposed of the body in a eucalyptus grove in Chikkajala.
