Bengaluru: Failed marriage talks led to murder of IBM employee, say cops
Bengaluru: The swift arrest of the killer of IBM techie, Kusum Rani, from Palwal in Haryana on Thursday, has revealed how a divorcee’s plans to get remarried, went awfully wrong.
The accused, Sukhbir Singh, 30, a software engineer and native of Palwal, had come to the city on January 19, telling Kusum he had work here and would meet her at her flat for lunch. Sukhbir got acquainted with Kusum on social media in December last after seeing her profile on shaadi.com and sent her a Facebook request. Later on January 9, they exchanged phone numbers and started talking to each other.
The killer was arrested from Haryana early Thursday by the city police. The accused had worked in Bengaluru with Yahoo India and Accenture between 2011 and 2013, after which he was unemployed, the police said. The accused is being brought to the city on Thursday by the police.
“Sukhbir had come down to the city by a flight on January 19, Tuesday. He told Kusum that he had some work in Bengaluru and would meet her at her flat for lunch. He had also conveyed to her that they were meeting each other for the first time and they would speak about their future plans together. Sukhbir reached Kusum’s flat in Mahaveer Kings’ Place in Brindavan Layout around 12:30 pm. Kusum insisted that he make an entry in the security register at the gate,” said Dr M B Boralingaiah, DCP South East. “Interestingly, Sukhbir wrote his name correctly, but entered an incorrect contact number to mislead others in case something went wrong. The CCTV footage was not clear about his identification except for some clues on his physical description,” the DCP added.
According to the police, their first meeting did not go down well as Kusum was unhappy that Sukhbir was unemployed. However, after the lunch, she started showing disinterest and sensing this Sukhbir demanded that she give him Rs 50,000 as he had come down only to see her. Kusum refused to give him money. He then asked her to at least buy him air-tickets to Delhi and give him at least Rs 3000-5000 for his expenses as he was not carrying any cash. Kusum got upset and told him to leave the house.
Heated arguments followed by a scuffle broke out between the two. Sukhbir strangled Kusum using a laptop charger chord and later stabbed her on her head using a pen and killed her.
He then left his blood soaked jeans near a vent at Kusum’s house and wore one of Kusum’s jeans from her wardrobe, the police said.
The accused then fled with her three ATM cards, two cheque books and her phone. He put them inside her laptop bag, locked the door and walked away. According to the police, while on his way to the airport, Sukhbir called up the bank using Kusum’s phone and requested for a new PIN number since Kusum had forgotten the existing one.
The bank responded immediately and sent a new PIN number to Kusum’s phone, using which Sukhbir withdrew Rs 11,000 from Bengaluru and took a flight to Mumbai. From there he took another flight to Delhi and withdrew Rs 34,000, to repay the money he had borrowed from one of his friends.
Sukhbir then took his car that was parked in the Delhi International Airport and drove to Palwal, where he was picked up by the city cops in less than 24 hours.
South East police had formed six teams that were working on tracking the movement of the accused.
The teams started collecting his profile details using social media communications with him and the victim, call detail records, tower locations, air-travel documents, and zeroed on him and successfully arrested him from his Palwal with the help of the local police there.
Sukhbir Singh will be brought to the city on Thursday night and the police will get his custody for further investigations.
