The main accused in the case of the Hajipur triple rape and murder case in Telangana, which had shaken the state last year, has now claimed that he was framed by the police.
M Srinivas Reddy was arrested in April 2019 for allegedly raping and killing three minor girls in Hajipur, a village at the outskirts of Hyderabad. The police had accused Srinivas of offering lifts to minor girls on his bike, on the pretext of dropping them, before he would take them to an isolated area and allegedly rape and kill them.
At a hearing on Friday, he told a fast-track court that he did not know how to ride a bike and did not possess a cellphone. He also claimed that he was impotent, and therefore could not have committed the crimes. The trial is almost complete and the court had asked Srinivas for his final statements before it announces its judgment.
Srinivas allegedly buried the bodies of the girls in abandoned wells at the outskirts of Hajipur village. However, this is unlikely to affect the case, as the police have submitted reports showing that DNA samples of the accused were found on the deceased's undergarments, along with fingerprint reports on alcohol bottles found close to the crime scene. They also submitted several statements from a reported 72 witnesses.
When the same was pointed out by the court on Friday. Srinivas claimed that both the reports were not genuine and accused the police of extracting a confession from him, though he was innocent.
The court also pointed to Srinivas that he was accused of killing a woman in Kurnool in Andhra Pradesh and had even been arrested by the local police earlier. Srinivas claimed that he was implicated in that case as well.
The court then posted the matter for hearing on Monday, January 6.
In July, months after unearthing the cases, the police filed three separate chargesheets and submitted forensic lab reports, technical evidence and eyewitness accounts to the court as part of the evidence. The trial began in the last week of October before a local fast track court in Nalgonda and the accused is currently lodged in the Nalgonda district jail.