A 17-year-old girl who went missing from Kochi on Tuesday was found murdered at Varattuparai near Valparai, around 120 km from Coimbatore, in the early hours of Wednesday. A joint team of Tamil Nadu and Kerala police apprehended the girl’s male friend who is from Kumbalam near Kochi.
The police said the body of the deceased, Eva Antony alias Gopika from Kaloor in Kochi, had multiple stab wounds allegedly inflicted by the 26-year-old man, Safar Shah. Preliminary investigation revealed that Shah stabbed the girl after she turned down his marriage proposal. The police said the accused brought the girl to Valparai in a car on Tuesday on the pretext of having a talk with her.
As Eva Antony, a class XII student, did not reach home in the evening, her father lodged a complaint with the Ernakulam Central police. Based on an input that the two were seen travelling in a car that belonged to a car service centre where the accused worked, the Kerala police alerted all the police stations in Ernakulam and nearby districts.
The Malakkapara police of Kerala found that the girl was with the accused in the car when it crossed Malakkapara check-post on the Kerala-Tamil Nadu border on Tuesday evening.
But, the girl was not found in the car when the Tamil Nadu police checked the vehicle at Waterfall check-post on Valaparai-Pollachi Road around 8.30 p.m. when Shah was driving towards Pollachi. They found blood stains inside the car and took Shah into custody.
Police said that when questioned, Shah confessed that he stabbed the girl to death and dumped her body in a tea plantation at Varattuparai. The body was traced in a joint search by the Valparai and the Malakkapara police in the early hours of Wednesday.
The Valparai police said that a police team from Ernakulam Central Station took the accused and the body of the deceased to Kochi on Wednesday afternoon.
