Hyderabad:
In a shocking revelation in the probe into a Telangana man’s murder a month after his wedding, police have found that Tejeswar’s wife Aishwarya and her lover Tirumal Rao discussed the Raja Raghuvanshi honeymoon killing in Meghalaya and considered making a similar plan to eliminate Tejeswar and keep the cops guessing.
According to Gadwal police chief T Srinivasa Rao, Aishwarya and Tirumal Rao have told them during questioning that they had initially planned to kill Tejeswar in the same manner as Raja Raghuvanshi. The plan was simple: Aishwarya would convince Tejeswar to take her out on a bike. On the way, the killers would attack them. Tejeswar would be murdered and Aishwarya would flee with Tirumal Rao. The cops, they thought, would be confused and chase a murder-cum-kidnapping angle.
This is exactly how the Raja Raghuvanshi case played out, where Raja’s body was found and his wife, Sonam, remained missing for days before police eventually unearthed her role in the conspiracy. Aishwarya and Tirumal Rao, however, have said they discussed the plan but later shelved it and considered other options.
Police have also found that 23-year-old Aishwarya got a GPS device on her husband’s bike so that they could track his movements. They also hired a neighbour Mohan to monitor Tejeswar’s movements and report to them.
Eight people have been arrested in the case. These include Aishwarya, Tirumal Rao, her mother Sujatha, who is believed to have known about the plan to eliminate Tejeswar, Tirumal’s father, a former head constable who allegedly helped his son, three hired assassins Nagesh, Parshuram and Rajesh, the neighbour, who was tailing Tejeswar.
Tejeshwar’s rotten body was found in a field at Panyam in Andhra Pradesh’s Nandyal district on June 21, three days after his family in Telangana’s Gadwal reported that he was missing. It was only on the basis of a tattoo ‘Amma’ in Telugu on his forearm that he was identified.
The family suspected his newly-wed wife Aishwarya’s involvement in the killing. “We warned Tejeswar not to marry Aishwarya as she was said to be in a relationship with a bank manager, but she convinced Tejeswar that she was in love with him,” said Tejavardhan, elder brother of Tejeswar. “When he went missing, I was observing her, she did not shed a tear, no sadness, so I told the police my suspicions and they investigated,” he said.
As police from the two adjoining states got to work, the probe revealed a grisly crime that snuffed out an unsuspecting young man’s life.
According to the officials part of the probe, there were as many as five failed attempts on Tejeswar’s life and he survived all, till luck ran out and he ended up dead in a canal.
A Mother-Daughter Love Triangle
Cops have found that Aishwarya’s mother, Sujatha, worked as a sweeper at a Non-Banking Financial Company. There, she met an officer, Tirumal Rao, and the two started a relationship in 2016. Later, when Sujatha went on leave, Aishwarya replaced her. She, too, had a relationship with Rao. The bank officer was married in 2019, and police found that he had also planned to get his wife killed.
When Sujatha found that her daughter was involved with Rao, she pressured her to end the relationship and marry Tejeswar, whom she had known for a while. Aishwarya refused. Sujatha managed to bring her around and reached out to Tejeswar. A wedding date was fixed, but Aishwarya went missing. Then she returned and told Tejeswar that she was incognito because her mother does not have the money to pay dowry. She insisted that she wanted to marry him. Tejeswar’s family advised him against this, but he agreed to the May 18 wedding.
The Plan — And The Murder
Tejeswar’s family members have said she was constantly on the phone with Rao, even during her wedding. Her call records revealed that they exchanged over 2,000 phone calls between February and June. District police chief T Srinivas Rao told NDTV the two would be on video calls for hours even when he was in office and even after she got married. Even on the day of Aishwarya’s wedding, they were on a video call.
The police said Tirumal found the killers to eliminate Tejeswar. Three people had approached him for obtaining loans, and he told them they would get the loan — and some more money — if they completed the hit job.
A police officer showed CCTV footage of Tejeswar, who worked as a land surveyor and dance teacher, getting into a car. “The killers took him in a car on the pretext of surveying a land. He was on the seat beside the driver when they hit him on the head, slit his throat and subsequently stabbed him in the stomach,” said Gadwal police chief T Srinivasa Rao. They pulled the body from the front to the back of the car and their clothes god bloodied. Tirumal Rao bought new clothes for them and they threw away the bloodied clothes, the police said.
The killers, police said, showed the body to Tirumal Rao over the phone and then, on his instructions, disposed of it in the canal. “The plan was to bury him in the layout of a land they had gone to survey in Kurnool, but noticing some people there, they dumped it in a canal. But there wasn’t enough water in it. We used cell phone signals to track Tejeswar’s location. By the time we found the body, it was putrefied. A tattoo on his arm saying ‘amma’ in Telugu helped us identify the body,” said the district police chief.
Escape Plan That Did Not Work
Rao and Aishwarya had hoped that Tejeswar’s body would not be found and he would be reported missing. They also had an escape plan. According to reports, Rao had taken a Rs 20-lakh loan and booked tickets for himself and Aishwarya to flee to Ladakh. Andaman was also a destination they explored.
Even after Tejeswar was killed, Aishwarya stayed at her in-laws’ home, ostensibly to avoid raising suspicion. This did not work. As soon as Tejeswar went missing, his family approached the police and shared their suspicions about Aishwarya and Rao.
As Gadwal cops worked overtime to trace Tejeswar’s whereabouts, they got a tip-off from police at Kurnool in the neighbouring Andhra Pradesh that villagers had found a body in an agricultural field. The Telangana cops rushed to the spot and confirmed it was Tejeswar’s. Rao’s father, a retired cop allegedly tried to protect his son from the police, but to no avail.
