Mid-air 'hijack' alert activates security protocol

THE DIRECTORATE GENERAL OF CIVIL AVIATION (DGCA) HAS BEGUN ITS PROBE INTO THE INCIDENT, AVIATION MINISTRY OFFICIALS SAID

- Neha LM Tripathi

HYDERABAD: A former armyman, who had confessed to killing his wife, dismembering her body, and boiling the remains in a pressure cooker before dumping them in a lake, was arrested on Tuesday, police said.

Sharing the details of the crime, police described the act as "rarest of rare" and of "barbaric nature".

Rachakonda police commissioner G Sudheer Babu said that the Meerpet police arrested the accused, Putta Gurumurthy (39), a resident of New Venkateshwara Colony in Jillelaguda, after ascertaining the murder through scientific evidence during the investigation that took 10 days.

"We initially registered a case as a missing person's report based on a complaint lodged by the victim, Venkata Madhavi's mother on January 18. Now that we have confirmed that it was murder, we changed the sections to 103 (1) (murder), 238 (tampering with evidence) and 85 (subjecting a woman to cruelty by husband) of the BNS," the police commissioner said.

The police took Gurumurthy into custody on January 23 for questioning. During the interrogation, he confessed to the crime.

"Gurumurthy gave a confessional statement that he killed his wife, cut her body into small parts, boiled them and later burnt them before crushing the bones into powder. It is an ultimate stature of barbaric nature. Utterly, rarest of rare ways of killing a person," police commissioner G Sudheer Babu told reporters.