Exactly 12 years ago, 19-year-old B. Pharmacy student of Tenali in Guntur district was allegedly sexually assaulted and killed by some miscreants in the ladies hostel at Ibrahimpatnam on the outskirts of Vijayawada. The Ibrahimpatnam police, who had visited the spot, found the girl dead in the bathroom of the hostel and registered a case the next day.
Since then, parents of the victim, met several police officials and have been making rounds to the courts seeking justice. Investigation officers could not identify the killers till date.
The sensational case, which rocked the united Andhra Pradesh then, and the country took many turns and the successive governments could not book the culprits so far. Women and student organisations raised a hue and cry and have been asking the government to trace the accused in the case.
Investigation officers questioned many witnesses, including the room mates, hostel staff and the suspects in the case, and arrested one Pidatala Satyam Babu in the case in 2008, and the trial court awarded life imprisonment to him in 2010.
Acquitted
However, the High Court of Judicature for Andhra Pradesh and Telangana acquitted Satyam Babu in 2017, and directed the police to book the real culprits in the case.
The government constituted a Special Investigation Team (SIT) and in 2018 handed over the long-pending case to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to take up fresh investigation. The CBI court registered cases against the court staff for destroying evidence in the case.
A few days ago, the CBI sleuths and the experts from Central Forensic Science Laboratory (CFSL) exhumed the remains of the victim from the burial ground at Tenali and collected samples for taking investigation afresh.
Parents’ plea
The victim’s parents alleged that kin of some political leaders were involved in the crime and side-tracked the investigation in the case.
“Hoping for justice, we allowed for re-investigation after 12 years. We request the government to expedite investigation under AP Disha Act – 2019 and do justice to us,” said the victim’s parents.
