From Warangal to Shadnagar: Sajjanar’s tryst with two similar plots, same end

HYDERABAD: There’s uncanny similarity between the killing of the four suspects in the veterinarian’s case and what happened in December 2008 to the three accused in the Warangal acid attack. The officer at the helm in both the cases happens to be the present Cyberabad commissioner — Vishwanath Chennappa Sajjanar.
The 1996 batch officer was also instrumental in ending the reign of dreaded gangster Nayeemuddin — he was killed in an encounter in Shadnagar two years ago when Sajjanar headed the Special Intelligence Branch (SIB).While it was during his stint as chief of Counter-Intelligence wing, which deals with terror-related activities, that two Simi activists were gunned down by police in Nalgonda district in 2015.
On December10, 2008, three men threw acid on a 20-year-old girl and her friend in Warangal town when they were returning home from college. The trio — S Srinivas (25), D Sanjay (22) and P Harikrishna (24) — attacked the young women because Srinivas was upset that one of them had spurned him. Protests raged across then undivided AP demanding justice for the young women. Three days after the attack, the three men were killed in an ‘encounter’ on December 13. Of the two girls, the target of the attack succumbed a few weeks later while the other survived and is now working in the US..
Sajjanar was then the Warangal SP.
Sajjanar shot to prominence after Warangal killings
Eleven years later, four men — Mohammed Areef, Jollu Shiva, Jollu Naveen and Ch Chennakeshavulu — accused of gang-raping a veterinarian and murdering her near a toll plaza in Shamshabad and then burning her in Shadnagar in Cybderabad, have met the same fate.
The area comes under Cyberabad police commissionerate limits, which Sajjanar heads now.

Sajjanar, a low-profile cop known for his tough posturing in police circles, went on to earn the sobriquet “encounter cop” after the Warangal killings.
In 2008, when the two students of Kakatiya College of Technology were attacked, Sajjanar claimed that the trio was shot dead in self-defence at Mamnoor on the outskirts of Warangal — where they were taken to retrieve the acid bottle and stolen motorbike — as they attacked cops with country-made weapons and acid bottles, which they had allegedly hidden.
On Friday, the four accused were taken early morning to the crime scene for reconstruction of events when, Sajjanar said, they snatched weapons and attacked the policemen. While Areef and Chennakeshavulu grabbed weapons from cops and tried to fire, Shiva and Naveen pelted stones on them. “They were killed in the crossfire,” Sajjanar said.
Sajjanar (51), who has an MBA and is a native of Hubli (now Hubballi) in Karnataka, began his career as an assault commandant in the elite antinaxalite force Greyhounds and was the additional SP (Jangaon) in 1997. There has been no looking back since then. He went on to head the police force in five naxaliteprone districts — Nalgonda, Warangal, Kadapa, Guntur and Medak. “An IPS officer getting control of five districts as an SP is also a rare instance. Normally, IPS officers get to head two or three districts before they are drafted into other wings,” a former IPS officer said.
Sajjanar was also sent to Odisha when he was in-charge of anti-Maoist operations in erstwhile Khammam district in 2000.
As the head of economic offences wing in the Crime Investigation Department (CID), Sajjanar went after multi-level marketing (MLM) firms for duping people. Under his leadership, cases were booked against Japan Life in 2002 and Amway in 2007. “Some organisations shut their businesses in the undivided AP when he was SP of the economic offences wing,” an inspector recalled.
(The victim's identity has not been revealed to protect her privacy as per Supreme court directives on cases related to sexual assault)