2015 Indian techie murder in Sydney: Australian Police announce $1 million reward for information on killer

The case has remained unresolved despite the lapse of over nine years. The absence of any clear visuals of the alleged killer at the park on CCTV footage has been a hindrance to the probe.

Australian news media reported on Monday that the police authorities in New South Wales had announced a $1 million reward for information in the course of an annual walk held at Parramatta Park in memory of Prabha Kumar. The reward would be available to informants from India as well, the media reports said quoting police officers.

Australian news media reported that New South Wales detective superintendent Danny Doherty had indicated that the murder was a targeted attack on Prabha Kumar and not a random killing that occurred with robbery or sexual assault as the motive.

The police have also indicated that Prabha Kumar’s husband Arun Kumar who was in India when the murder occurred was a person of interest in the case but not the only one being investigated.

“We’re not excluding other people as persons of interest and obviously there’s someone out there who committed the murder… who actually stabbed Prabha to death,” the detective superintendent was quoted as saying by ABC News.

In 2017, a team of police officers from New South Wales travelled to Karnataka to investigate the murder of Prabha Kumar. At the time, the police were trying to ascertain if someone in the techie’s family in Karnataka tampered with evidence in the aftermath of the murder.

The team of Australian Police officers spoke to the family of the murdered techie in Karnataka – including her India-based husband with whom she was on a long-distance call when stabbed, and others connected to the couple. The husband had reported hearing his wife crying for help on the long-distance call before she was killed.

The techie’s husband had also reported that his wife had spoken about being followed by a stranger during her walk home. After realising from the phone call that his wife had been stabbed by someone, the techie’s husband had rushed to Australia.

“There seems to be some concrete evidence with which they are working. They would not travel to India if they did not have some leads… They are working on the call details of multiple people linked to the victim,” police sources in Karnataka said in 2017.

In 2016, the New South Wales Police had indicated that they were considering the possibility that persons who committed the crime or helped commit the crime were from “outside of Australia”.

According to accounts provided by some members of Prabha Kumar’s family, she was looking to return to India in April 2015 to live with her young daughter. The techie had reportedly been saving up money to buy property in her daughter’s name.