Three people, including two girls, have been arrested for the murder of a 21-year-old man, the city police said Tuesday, two days after the victim’s bloodied remains were found on a deserted farm land in the city’s outskirts.
A police officer said the girls, both students of Class 10, were not known to each other but had “fallen in love” with same man, the victim Premkumar.
“Premkumar befriended them through Instagram last year, met them privately and clicked intimate photographs. Later, he started demanding money from both and threatened to upload them online and share them with their parents,” the officer added.
He said the girls had allegedly paid Premkumar Rs 50,000 each last year, but sought help from another “Instagram friend” Ashok, the third person arrested in the case, when Premkumar asked for more money. The girls told Ashok’s to retrieve Premkumar’s phone and delete all their photographs and videos stored in it, the officer added.
Ashok, the officer said, got to work with his three other friends and asked Premkumar to come to the Sholavaram toll plaza on Wednesday. “Premkumar was kidnapped from the toll plaza to a deserted area where they beat him up. On Friday night, he died of torture and they buried him at a deserted land in Eechangadu,” he said.
Farmers of Eachangadu village spotted hair and bloodied remains of Premkumar’s body on a deserted farm land on Sunday, following which police reached the spot. The officer said police initially had no clue about the identity of the body until they sent out an alert to all police stations and came to know of a person missing near Chennai.
“When we identified the body, the victim’s friends gave the first tip-off about the girls as Premkumar had told his friends about meeting them on the day he left home,” the officer added.
The officer said both the girls, however, claimed ignorance about the murder and gave a statement that they had only asked Ashok to retrieve Premkumar’s phone and destroy it.
Ashok’s friends, who helped him kidnap Premkumar, are still at large” We will get a clearer picture only after we nab them,” the officer said.
Premkumar’s body was handed over to his family on Monday after a postmortem.