Two die in course of New Year festivities in Bengaluru

New year festivities caused two tragedies in Bengaluru on Friday with a youth being murdered by his friends and another one falling to his death from the second floor of a building he was partying at.

A 27-year-old cable operator was stabbed to death in JP Nagar in South Bengaluru around 1.30 am on Friday in the course of a New Year party at an accommodation facility he shared with three others. The victim has been identified as Santosh Kumar, a native of Tarikere in the Chikkamagaluru district of Karnataka. His roommates Deepak, Pavan and Manoj are suspected to have committed the murder. Police said the four were drinking at their home when a fight broke out over a trivial issue. The police were called by the employer of the youths after a neighbor reported the stabbing. Deepak, Pavan and Manoj escaped from the home soon after the stabbing but the Subramanyapura police nabbed them in a few hours.

In the second incident, a 25-year-old lab assistant died after he fell from the second floor of a building at Nallurahalli Cross near Whitefield in South-East Bengaluru. The deceased has been identified as Shivakrishna, a native of Andhra Pradesh. Police said that he was celebrating the arrival of the New Year with his friends at his residence and had been drinking. He came out of his residence around 1 am with his mobile phone but never returned, police said. When his friends came out around 1.30 am and they found out he had fallen to the ground from the building. The Whitefield police who were summoned shifted the body to hospital for a postmortem and took up a case of a suspicious death.