The barcode of a liquor bottle found near the scene of crime helped Hyderabad’s Rachakonda police crack a murder case. On January 29, when cattle rearers found the charred remains of a heavily decomposed body in the Keesara police station limits, the officials were initially clueless. The body was later identified to be that of 35-year-old B Srinivas.

“The murder occurred on December 27 night, while the charred body was found almost a month later. The body was decomposed and hard to identify,” said Keesara inspector B Prakash, according to the Times of India. “The victim's mother identified the body. Later, teams visited the scene of offence where the body was found and recovered a bottle of whiskey. The barcode on the bottle led us to a wine shop at Pudur X Roads,” he added.

The police then reviewed the CCTV footage at the wine shop and found that Srinivas had visited the wine shop with two other persons. After buying the liquor, he boarded a motorcycle along with the two men. Police then tracked down the two men in the video, identified to be Thiagala Yadagiri, uncle of Srinivas’s wife and his friend Sepathi Ramesh, and began questioning them.

According to the police, the two men took an inebriated Srinivas to the Dharmaram forest area. After getting him drunk, the two men smashed his head in with a boulder and burnt the body.

“On interrogation, they confessed to having committed the murder on behalf of Swapna, the victim’s wife and her parents, who gave him and his friend Rs 25,000 for the murder,” said the inspector.

“Srinivas was unemployed and an addict who used to harass the family,”  he added.

The police on Saturday arrested Swapna, her father Bantu Mallesham and her mother Bantu Laxmi, Yadagiri and his friend Ramesh for the murder.