Chennai: Two weeks after a 21-year-old engineering student was found dead in a pond in a stone quarry at Keerapakkam in Guduvanchery, three persons suspected to have murdered him were arrested on Monday.
The deceased, identified as Saravanan (21), son of Karthikeyan (45) of Adambakkam, was a second-year mechanical engineering student in a private college in West Tambaram. The probe into his death began after the autopsy report filed had determined the cause of death as murder.
Three special teams were formed under Kanchipuram Superintendent of Police Santhosh Hadimani but the only lead available was a text message sent to Dhanaraj, one of Saravanan’s friends, on January 26 requesting that '2,000 be transferred to Saravanan's account.
The Adambakkam police informed the Kayar police who traced the number to one Hari in Thiruvallur. Hari told the police that he had sold the phone to a second-hand phone store in Moore Market. The police then rushed to the store and were able to trace the identity and arrest one Deepan Chakravarthi, 26, a financier in Keerapakkam. Through him, the other two - Rajesh, 23, who works for a private company and Parthiban from Padianallur who had accompanied him to the phone shop - were also arrested. The trio then confessed that Deepan had loaned Saravanan '1.2 lakh in cash, which he had not returned even after several threats. In an act of vengeance, they kidnapped and murdered him and threw his body, tied to a large stone, into a lake.
Workers at a stone quarry in Keerapakkam, Guduvanchery, spotted the decomposed body of a young boy and alerted the police. Kayar police came to the spot and tried to fish out the body, but the body was tied to a large stone, which was under water. The help of fire and rescue services personnel was sought and they retrieved the body.
“The bike was an expensive one and we believe the trio may have taken it,” a police officer said. The accused claim that they did not take the bike and that it may have been stolen.
Meanwhile, the trio also confessed that the reason for them buying a second-hand phone and messaging Saravana’s friend was to throw off investigations and lead Saravanan’s parents to believe he was alive.
