Mysore students’ murder: Cops staring at a dead end?

The police seem to have taken the abduction-cum-murder of two students from Mysore seriously enough. On Monday, home minister R Ashok himself called a meeting of senior officers and deployed some of his top guns to nab the kidnappers. A team has been formed under the supervision of RK Datta, Additional director general of Police, and comprises at least five officers. Even former police commissioner Shankar Bidari’s help was sought.

But if you look at the case from the other end of the spectrum, maybe the police are just clutching at straws — the kidnappers seem to be highly professional and have left no trace. They made one of the abductees — Sudhindra — call his father and make the ransom demand of Rs5 crore on their behalf. Officers tracking the case say that Sudhindra was also forced to write the ransom letter which was delivered to his father on June 9 (see box for details of the case).

But here’s the chilling bit — in the letter that Sudhindra wrote on June 9, he apparently told his father that he was being tortured and that whatever demands the kidnappers had should be met. And till Sunday morning, when the bodies were found in Chikkaballapur, the two students were being dragged across Bangalore to make ransom calls. Coin-operated phones were used by the kidnappers to cover their steps and calls were made from Hebbal, Koramangala, Devanahalli, Kengeri and Chikkaballapur . The police had been informed about the abduction but to no avail.

And here’s the other chilling bit about the case: if it was indeed a gang of professional kidnappers, it’s still out there, roaming free.
The police have clammed up after orders from “the top”. Nearly all the officers in the special team have kept their cellphones switched off. One senior officer said he would not comment for “at least two days”.

Sudhindra and Vignesh, second year BBM students at Mysore’s Mahajan College, had left their homes in Hunsur on June 8 to take a test in their college. They never appeared for the test and their parents lodged a missing persons’ complaint when they did not return home till late in the evening. Their bodies, bearing multiple stab wounds, were found in a field near Agalagurki village on Chikkaballapur Bypass Road.    

All ransom calls were made to Sudhindra’s father, Mohan Kumar, an industrialist and a cousin of Hunsur MLA H P Manjunath. No calls were made to Vignesh’s father, Srinath. Maybe that was why one officer let slip that they were also looking at the possibility of the murders being an insider’s job.