Bihar man kills 9 in Telangana to cover up his lover’s murder

HYDERABAD: To cover up a murder he had committed in March, a 24-year-old native of Bihar killed nine others whose bodies were found floating in a well in Warangal last week. The accused, Sanjay Kumar Yadav, was arrested on Monday for the sensational killings.
Police said Sanjay single-handedly executed the murder plan by mixing sedatives in food and then throwing them in the borewell.Warangal police commissioner V Ravinder said Sanjay carried out the murders to cover up the killing of his live-in partner Rafiqa, who was related to six members of the family, originally from West Bengal, whose bodies were found in the well.
Apart from the six, two other men from Bihar — Sham and Sriram — and another from Tripura — Shakeel, who worked at the same gunny bag making unit as Rafiqa’s kin, also had the food and fell unconscious.
“To cover up one murder, he committed nine more,” Ravinder told reporters. Police said they also obtained a CCTV footage which showed Sanjay moving on a bicycle on Wednesday night near the gunny making unit.
Sanjay, who has been living in Warangal for the last six years, mixed around 60 sleeping pills in the food taken by the victims. After they fell unconscious, he dragged each one of them and pushed them into the abandoned agricultural well at Gorrekunta in the early hours of May 21. The well is located on the premises of a gunny bag manufacturing unit where Maqsood Alam (47), wife Nisha and their family along with two natives of Bihar stayed.
Sanjay in his confession to police said that he murdered the nine people after Nisha threatened to complain to cops about her missing niece Rafiqa, whom he had killed on March 6.
Sanjay had taken Rafiqa to West Bengal to meet her family. While returning to Warangal, he gave her butter milk laced with sedatives, strangulated her and pushed her out of a train in Andhra Pradesh. At the time, Tadepalligudam railway police had registered a case of an unidentified woman’s death.
“He killed Rafiqa because she came to know about him getting closer to her daughters from an earlier marriage,” a police official said.
Ever since Sanjay had returned to Warangal, Nisha has been questioning him about Rafiqa’s absence, leaving him worried. Upon coming to know that May 20 was the birthday of one of the sons of Maqsood, Sanjay reached their place and chatted with them before mixing sleeping pills in the food being cooked.
Between 12.30 am and 5 am on May 21, he dragged them one by one to the well located nearby and threw them into the water. The nine persons, who were unconscious, drowned, police said.
The bodies of Maqsood, Nisha, their daughter Bushra Khatoon and her three-year-old son were recovered on May 21, while the bodies of Shabaz Alam (20), Sohail Alam (18), Shakeel (30), Sham and Sriram were found the next day.