The Mahalakshmi Layout police on Friday arrested a 44-year-old cloth merchant who allegedly paid his friend to murder his wife, suspecting her fidelity and later hung her body from the ceiling to make it look like suicide.
According to the police, the deceased, Prema alias Pushpalatha, 33, was working as a housekeeping staff at a private company and was away from home for work most of the time. This led Shivashankar to suspect her and even installed a CCTV camera at home to check on her.
The couple used to have frequent fights after Shivashankar accused her of having illicit affairs and decided to eliminate her. He roped in his friend Vinay and offered him ₹3 lakh to kill her and gave an advance amount of ₹40,000. Shivashankar disconnected the CCTV camera at home. Vinay walked into the house when Prema was alone and strangulated her to death before hanging her body on the ventilator of the house and escaping.
Shivashankar had created an alibi and went out of the city on the pretext of a business trip. The police initially registered a case of suspicious death based on circumstantial evidence, even though Shivashankar claimed his wife committed suicide. However, the postmortem report confirmed the murder. Based on the report, the police stepped up the probe and zeroed in on Shivashankar through his call record details and recovered the CCTV footage recorded around the house.
The police finally managed to track down Vinay, who confessed to the murder. The probe revealed that Vinay was earlier booked for killing his wife, suspecting her character, and was arrested. He was out on bail.
