Solving Crime: A day out, a kidnapping and futile search; how Bengaluru cops cracked 2011 murder of Bihar engineering student

Who is Tushar Kumar?

Tushar, 22, who studied at Sri Krishna Institute of Technology at Hesaraghatta Road in Bengaluru, was the son of Pramod Mehta, a reputed contractor in Bihar. While he did well in studies, Tushar had the habit of visiting dance bars and attending parties where he met women and befriended them.

During one such visit, he met Shivani Thakur, 22, who worked at a pub in Bengaluru. They exchanged numbers and started chatting and talking over the phone. Though Shivani was married to Waris, 21, Tushar was not aware of this. Incidentally, Waris also hailed from Patna and was acquainted with Tushar as the two of them used to stay together when they were preparing for engineering entrance examinations. However, they did not meet or communicate often since then.

A police officer, who was part of the investigation, says Waris had sought Rs 5,000 from Tushar but the latter not only refused, he also started to avoid calls from Waris. At one point, Waris came to know that Shivani was friends with Tushar and he soon began to hatch a plan.

M S Ashok. (Special Arrangement)

A day out and a ‘party’

On January 14, 2011, Tushar and Shivani decided to meet at Esteem mall in the city. An investigating official says this was as per a plan drawn up by Waris. While Shivani came to the mall with her cousin Preethi Raj, 19, Tushar arrived with his friend Ayushman Lal. After visiting McDonalds, they were about to leave when Shivani had a private conversation with Tushar which made him change his mind.

Tushar announced that he was headed to Shivani’s house for a party, but Ayushman was unable to join them as he had an examination. After a short while, Tushar left with the two women in an autorickshaw to Attur Layout in Yelahanka New Town.

According to the police chargesheet, Ayushman left for his room and though he tried contacting Tushar’s mobile phone, it was found to be switched off. The next morning, he tried again and a person answered the call, but he was not able to talk to Tushar. No one would again.

A ransom call and subsequent search

On January 16, Pramod Mehta received a phone call from Tushar’s phone. It was a ransom call demanding Rs 10 lakh to release his kidnapped son. Mehta rushed to Bengaluru and filed a police complaint.

M S Ashok, then police inspector of Amruthahalli police station, recalls, “I got information from the DCP’s office about the kidnapping. It was a newly established police station and I was the first police inspector. Even as the staff were yet to start working together as a team, this kidnapping case came to us in the form of a race against time.”

Currently the Deputy Superintendent of the Special Enquiry unit in the Criminal Investigation Department (CID), Ashok recounts, “We had no choice but to wait for the abductors’ call as the mobile phone was kept switched off. He would call and ask Mehta to reach a specific location only to change the location later. Since the phone was kept switched off, we were then unable to track them. After doing several rounds of this for a day, on January 19 the caller asked Mehta to go to the city railway station with cash.”

“Mehta went to the railway station in the morning with a suitcase. Our officers were in mufti. We had kept a few original notes and some pieces of paper in the suitcase. The moment a person received the cash, we nabbed him. Upon inquiry, we found that he was Rohith Kumar, 24, from Jharkhand who used to be a small-time estate broker in Bengaluru.”

“We asked him to take us to Tushar. He did not utter a word, but took us to Sri Lodge next to the railway station where Waris was. At this point, we still believed that Tushar was alive,” he remembers.

The two men did not reveal that they had killed Tushar. Instead, they took the officers to different locations for a few hours. “They took us to a place saying Tushar was confined in a room. After a point, I decided that we needed to go hard. We brought them to the police station and questioned them again,” Ashok says.

The next day, the accused took the officers near a eucalyptus plantation near Attur Layout where the investigators, much to their dismay, found Tushar’s rotting body. “We were shocked. We were thinking that the youth would be released once their demands were met. While we were happy to solve the case, it was also a sad moment,” he adds.

Connecting the dots

The police officials who took Waris and Rohith into custody eventually found that two women were also involved, which was corroborated by Ayushman’s statement. Shivani Thakur and Preethi Raj were arrested from Mumbai.

“Waris, a college dropout, is the son of a schoolteacher. Shivani and Preethi worked in bars. While Waris came to know about Shivani’s friendship with Tushar, he hatched a plan to extort money from his father,” Ashok says.

On January 14, after Tushar arrived at Shivani’s house, they consumed liquor. Later, Waris arrived there, much to Tushar’s surprise. Waris threatened Tushar and asked him to call his father seeking money. When he objected, Waris and Rohith hit him with a bottle and strangled him. Later, they put his body in a gunny bag and took it to the isolated eucalyptus plantation on a two-wheeler before dumping it there.

While Tushar was murdered on January 14, Waris and the others decided to go ahead with their abduction plan to extort money from his father.

The verdict

Amruthahalli police filed the chargesheet in the case on July 18, 2012, charging all four accused under sections 364(a) (kidnap for ransom), 302 (murder), 201 (causing disappearance of evidence) and 120(b) (criminal conspiracy) of the Indian Penal Code.

On October 31, 2014, a fast-track court convicted all the accused and sentenced them to life imprisonment. Shuklaksha Palan, judge of the 15th fast-track court, said in his order, “No doubt all the accused are youthful offenders, they have caused the murder of the deceased after kidnapping him. No doubt this court feels that it is not a rarest of the rare case to award a death sentence, so the accused are liable to be punished with life imprisonment and also liable to pay fine since the family members of the deceased are to be compensated to some extent.”

The convicts later approached Karnataka High Court and in January 2023, a division bench headed by Justice B Veerappa upheld the fast-track court’s judgment.

Recalling the case after 12 years, Ashok says, ” Besides the crime team, I also have to remember Pramod Mehta who stood firmly by us to punish his son’s killers. Though Waris does not come from an affluent family like Tushar, his parents were educated. He and the others did not have an idea of the consequences that they would face for their actions. All of them were below 25 years and Preethi was just 19 years old.”