For nine-year-old Kabilan, his neighbour Nagaraj picking him up from private tuitions in MGR Nagar was a regular affair. But on Wednesday, Nagaraj arrived an hour earlier than usual. The child unsuspectingly left with him, only to be abducted to an empty apartment in Selaiyur where his throat was brutally slit with a broken glass bottle. As Kabilan lay in a pool of his own blood, Nagaraj proceeded to smash his head with an iron rod, ending the life of the fourth standard student.
And all this was over a fight with the innocent child's father.
Karthikeyan and Manjula, Kabilan's parents, lived in MGR Nagar and had been quarrelling for some time over Manjula’s alleged close friendship with neighbour Nagaraj.
While Karthikeyan works as an interior designer, Manjula is a government employee. Police sources told TNM that a few weeks ago Karthikeyan had filed a police complaint over the affair between Nagaraj and Manjula. The police had remanded him for 10 days but he was later released on bail.
On Wednesday evening, however, things took a gruesome turn when Nagaraj, hatched an elaborate plan to murder Kabilan to ‘teach Karthikeyan a lesson.’
Nagaraj who worked as marketing manager at a real estate agency, was tasked with selling apartments in a gated community nearby. He bought the unsuspecting boy dinner at a restaurant in Pallavaram and then took him to one of the unsold flats in the gated community.
The 28-year-old was well versed with the topography of the building as he often used it as a drinking haunt.
On the very same evening, police had formed a special team to start looking for the boy based on Karthikeyan’s kidnapping complaint.
Speaking to TNM, one investigating officer said, “After he killed him, he tried to drink the tile pasting liquid in the apartment and commit suicide. But he vomited it out. So he shut the door and coolly walked to Perungalathur nearby and took a bus to Vellore.” The police nabbed him in the wee hours of Thursday morning.
According to the investigating officers, Nagaraj readily confessed to the crime. He reportedly said, “I wanted to teach Karthikeyan a lesson.”
Karthikeyan had told media persons on Thursday that Nagaraj may have committed the crime to get the former’s properties registered in his wife’s name. However, officials close to the investigation have denied that there was any property related dispute between them.
Nagaraj has been booked for murder and remanded at the central jail in Puzhal.