Accused in mixer- grinder blast case in Hassan arrested

NT Correspondent

Bengaluru: The Hassan police who had been tracing the absconding accused in the mixergrinder explosion case, arrested Anup Kumar, 42, a resident of Bengaluru, and presented him before a local district court. Stalking a 38-year-old woman from Hassan, Kumar had allegedly befriended her through a matrimonial website.

According to the sources, the woman was a divorcee working at a beauty parlour in the city. The police said the woman had uploaded her profile on a matrimonial website. The accused Anup Kumar, claiming to be a wealthy businessman, befriended her and began stalking her, pestering her to marry him, a proposal which she turned down.

However, Anup Kumar persisted and turned up at her house in Hassan, where she slapped him and sent him away. However, he began sending several messages, and videos from various phone numbers, all of which she kept blocking.

He sent videos purportedly showing several kilograms of “raw gold pebbles” and a considerable amount of currency notes, saying he would give all of them to her if she married him. Earlier, the victim had filed a complaint with the Byappanahalli police in Bengaluru in October 2022, when the police called him and reprimanded him.

However, he later turned violent and threatened to kill her if she did not marry him on several phone calls. When she blocked all the numbers, he began sending courier parcels: first, a Rs 50 note with a message that the next time he would send Rs 50,000, and then another parcel of decoration lights.

She threw both away. Recently, she received a heavy parcel, and she returned it to the courier centre asking them to send it back. The woman returned the parcel to the DTDC courier service collection point in the Kuvempunagar Extension in Hassan, asking them to return it to the sender.  

However, she refused to pay the Rs 350 courier return charges, and it was lying there. Shashi Kumar, in-charge of the centre, found the sender had given a fake name, phone number and address, prompting him to open the parcel. As he opened it, the mixergrinder exploded, injuring him severely