Rowdy, realtor friend hacked in supari killing

A gangster and his realtor friend were brutally murdered by an armed gang in southern Bengaluru on Sunday night in what the police described as murders driven by old rivalry and family enmity.

Manjunatha alias Tamma Manja, 27, and his friend Varun Reddy, 24, were riding a scooter in JP Nagar when a group of six to seven men followed them in a Hyundai i10.

The car driver tried to ram the scooter near an Axis Bank ATM at 24th Cross in Puttenahalli Junction around 11.35 pm.

Alarmed by this, Manjunatha accelerated but the car driver eventually got close enough to ram the scooter.

While Manjunatha and Reddy fell off the scooter, the car hit a footpath and crashed into an electricity pole before coming to a halt. The assailants quickly got off the car and attacked Reddy with lethal weapons. One of them took a knife and stabbed him to death.

By this time, Manjunatha had got up and started running. The assailants chased him for 200 metres and caught hold of him near Hotel Nandhini. They brutally attacked him on the head, hands, legs and other parts of the body, leaving him for dead. They then fled the spot, abandoning the car.

A preliminary investigation revealed that the car belonged to a businessman named Virabhadraiah who had sold it to one Madhusoodan. A furniture store located near the crime scene had CCTV cameras but they had stopped working eight days ago.

Manjunatha was a resident of Kanakapura and was listed as a history-sheeter at Thalaghattapura and Kumaraswamy Layout police stations. Reddy was a resident of BTM Layout and helped in his father’s construction and real-estate businesses.

Assailants not identified

While police have not yet identified the assailants, a senior official pointed to the presence of two rival criminal gangs.

Rohini Katoch Sepat, DCP (South), who visited the spot soon after the incident, said the killers were “possibly” hired by a relative of one of the victims in a case of supari killing.

A case of murder has been registered at the JP Nagar police station.