New Delhi, October 09, 2021 (PPI-OT): The police in Indian state of Karnataka have confirmed that 24-year-old Muslim youth Arbaaz was killed by contract killers. The decapitated body of Arbaaz was found on railway tracks in Belagavi on September 28. His family says that Arbaz was killed on the charges of being in relationship with a Hindu girl.
The police said the killers were hired by the parents of the girl. The police have also made ten arrests for the brutal killing, including the parents of Hindu girl and the member of extremist Hindu group Sri Ram Sena Hindustan, apart from seven other contract killers. In the press release, the police say several other accused have been identified.
The police said extensive material and digital evidence has been collected, which points that the woman’s family was opposed to her interfaith relationship. They approached Pundalik Mutgekar alias Maharaja Nagappa, a member of the extremist group Sri Ram Sena Hindustan – which is an offshoot of another notoriously violent right-wing group Sri Ram Sene, to kill Arbaaz.
Pundalik was one of the first people to be arrested, and according to the police, he has named the others in the case. According to media, Pundalik is believed to have confessed that he and the woman’s father, Eerappa, called Arbaaz to Khanapur, where the woman’s family lived. Because Arbaaz refused to break up with the woman, they killed him. His body was chopped up and left on the railway track in order to destroy evidence.
While there were considerable efforts by right-wing trolls on Twitter to first deny that the killing even occurred and then to claim that it was death by suicide, the post-mortem report clearly suggested that Arbaaz was murdered. The report said that he was stabbed in the neck and back around the time of his death. The accused have been booked under various sections of the Indian Penal Code, including murder, disappearing evidence, wrongful restraint, criminal conspiracy, extortion, among others.
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