Mobile no. on bus ticket led cops to serial killer in Telangana

HYDERABAD: It was a bus ticket retrieved from the clothes of one of the victims during post-mortem that gave police their first breakthrough in the Mahabubnagar serial killing case. The accused, B Kasamaiah alias Kasim, was arrested on June 29 and is suspected to have killed six people – five women and one man – over the past two years. All the women were raped before being murdered.
The body of this victim was found on May 24 by Bhoothpur police from near a bridge.Her throat was slit, head smashed and there was nothing to identify her. The woman was finally identified through a blurry CCTV footage retrieved from a wine shop near the site of the crime, which led cops to her village Gajulapeta in Mahabubnagar.
But the real challenge at hand for cops was tracking the accused. That’s when a bus ticket with a phone number scribbled on it found in the woman’s clothes came as a plausible lead.
The number was of her cousin who told cops that she had called him multiple times from an unknown number asking for ₹2,000.
“Tracking that unknown number led us to one Suresh. He revealed that a woman had borrowed his phone to make a call a month ago. He also confirmed that she was accompanied by a man, who later turned out to be Kasim,” said a cop.
“Incidentally, Suresh happened to be familiar with Kasim too as the latter had only weeks before that stolen his uncle’s mobile phone,” the cop added.
According to Suresh’s statement, an altercation broke out at the spot when Kasim refused to admit to the theft and later asked for ₹7,000 to return the mobile when Suresh put his uncle on the phone. During this conversation, when Kasim said he was from Chintalkunta in Jadcherla, Suresh’s uncle asked him to meet him there to complete the ‘transaction’. The entire conversation was recorded by Suresh.
When Kasim landed in Jadcherla, Suresh’s uncle and others snatched the phone and beat him up.
“At that time somebody from the crowd clicked Kasim’s photo,” the cop said.
It was this photograph that was subsequently circulated among local wine shops and toddy centres.
Kasim was nabbed when he turned up at one of them recently.
Alocal from Chintalkunta later identified Kasim and said he had left the village and was working as a labourer in different places across erstwhile Mahabubnagar district.