Fear and a certain eerie silence are palpable as one walks through the corridors of Suncity Corporate Leisure Apartments in Iblur where Saurabh Rastogi, a senior manager at Genpact, was murdered in the most barbaric manner on Sunday night.

Neighbours didn’t know that Rastogi and his wife Ankisha stayed in Flat 801 on the eighth floor in ‘C’ Block, until they read about his murder in the newspapers the following day. 

Rastogi appears to have spent considerable time abroad and returned from his last posting in Cape Town, South Africa just to wind up his stay in Bangalore before getting ready to relocate to the United States on June 27, to take up a new assignment that came with a promotion. 

Rastogi spent most of his last days in the City, selling his furniture, paying up last-minute bills and packing up to start a new life in the US, his family said. 

While Rastogi’s wife and some family members were away at the police station for questioning, his first cousins who were at his eighth-floor flat remember him as a calm man with no bad habits whatsoever and describe him as “a self-made man.”

 “We don’t know how anyone can be murdered in such a cold blooded, brutal manner. We are shocked and the family still hasn’t come to terms with it,” said Sachin, Rastogi’s first cousin, who lives and works in Delhi.

Sachin, who grew up with Rastogi, asserted: “We don’t think that it is a murder for gain because there’s really nothing missing from the house, but a few things from the cupboard have been pulled out and the cupboard drawers were left open just to mislead the people that there has been an attempt to steal. We totally think it is a revenge killing.”

Sachin further said that Sunday night was the only time Rastogi  was alone at home because his wife Ankisha was away in Pune. 

“He was not killed in a forceful manner because it looks like the murderer is known to the family. He was killed in the most inhumane way. There were eight deep cuts around his neck and he was also stabbed in the stomach.

 The murderer made sure he killed him in such a way that he would never be able to breathe again,” Sachin said.