Mahadevapura woman murder case: Neighbour arrested

NT Correspondent

Bengaluru: Mahadevapura police probing the mysterious death of a 21-year-old woman employee of a petrol station have arrested a neighbour for allegedly killing her after she resisted his sexual advances.

Terror gripped the residents of Lakshmi Sagar Layout after a young woman’s body was found lying a few metres away from her house on Friday morning.

The deceased was identified as Mahananda, a native of Kalaburagi district, who was living with her elder sister at a rented accomodation while working at Shell petrol station in Mahadevapura.

The arrested accused was identified by the jurisdictional police as Krishna Chanda Setti, hailing from Odisha and was working as a security guard at a tech park in Bengaluru.

According to Mahananda’s sister, the deceased was cooking rice for dinner but suddenly went out of the house and had gone missing since then. An officer who had inspected the crime scene told News Trail that the accused, after killing the woman, had initially kept the body in a barrel and later dumped it right in front of the house around 5 am on Friday morning.

“The police were suspicious when they found that the feet of the deceased were clean which meant she had not walked towards the spot where her body was found later,” the officer said.

When the police were investigating and recording statements from the neighbours, the accused who was living in the house next door did not come outside for hours. However another neighbour alleged that she saw Mahananda going to Krishna’s house on Thursday.

Based on this, the police took the accused into custody and inquired with him. It was revealed that prior to her death Mahananda had placed a pot of rice on the stove for cooking, and came out of the house. At this time, the accused Krishna pulled her inside his house.

The accused attempted to rape her and when she started screaming and resisting, he smothered her by covering her nose and mouth until she died of suffocation. Later Krishna wrapped the body in a bed-sheet and kept the body in a barrel in the corner of the house.

His wife returned around midnight from her workplace. After she went to sleep, the accused dumped the body outside the deceased woman’s house before dawn.