Police crack boy’s murder, arrest two

Belagavi Police have solved a murder that seemed tough to crack at first. A few days ago, villagers called the police when they found a headless body of a boy floating in the Vedaganga river in Hosur near Hukkeri.

It was difficult to identify the body as there were no clues. Superintendent of Police Sanjiv Patil formed a special team to investigate.

The team began its search in earnest. And, within a week, the team not only identified the victim but also apprehended the culprits.

The unfortunate victim was a 12-year-old schoolboy from Hosur village. The accused are 60-year-old Noor Mohammad Konnur and his associate Hanumant Bevanoor of Hosur.

Konnur was upset that the boy had become a hindrance to his extra marital affair with the boy’s aunt.

The boy hailed from Nainglaj village. But since there were no good schools in that village, Vashappa, the boy’s father, had shifted him to Hosur village, where his widowed sister lived. Konnur is said to be in an illicit relationship with the woman for some years. With the boy shifting to her house, he could not frequent it often.

He kidnapped the boy when he was returning from school and strangled him to death in a sugarcane field.

He came back and told his friend Bevanoor. The two then severed the head from the body with a machete.

They hid the boy’s bicycle and school bag in different places. They threw the head in a well and threw the body into the river after packing it in a gunny bag.

“Our officers worked hard on this case,’’ the Superintendent of Police said. They found a sticker of a government school on the boy’s clothes. Then, they looked for complaints of missing boys in nearby police stations. They used drones to look for other clues, from the site of the offence and detected the bicycle and the bag. They arrested the accused after they collected enough evidence,’’ Dr. Patil said.

He has congratulated the team of officers led by Inspectors Mohammad Rafiq Tahsildar, Ramesh Chayagol and Prahlad Channagiri.