A 22-year-old gym trainer’s lure of a smartphone is what is believed to have resulted in the brutal murder of a Flipkart delivery man in Bengaluru last Friday.
The body of 29-year-old Nanjunda Swamy was recovered from the lift shaft of a building in Vijaynagar where he had gone to deliver a phone.
According to the police, Swamy was brutally murdered as K Varun Kumar, a gym-trainer by profession, did not have the money to pay for a Chinese phone he had ordered.
According to a Times of India report, throat of 29-year-old Nanjunda Swamy had been slit, allegedly by 22-year-old gym trainer K Varun Kumar as didn’t have Rs 11,999 for the Redmi Note 3 he had ordered through Flipkart.
According to the report, Varun badly needed a smartphone after he joined the gym – some 10 days back – as all his friends and clients in the gym had one.
Varun asked his father, a mechanic, to lend him the amount but he refused as he didn’t have that much money and told him that he should bear his expenses on his own. It was then that Varun allegedly decided that killing the delivery agent was the only way to own a phone and hatched a plot to execute the crime.
On December 8, he ordered the phone online and gave the gym’s landline number as his own.
On December 9, Swamy called up Varun after reaching near the mentioned address who asked him to come to the second floor. Varun first tried to allegedly snatch the phone from Swamy, but he somehow managed to overpower Varun and ran out of the gym.
The report says that Varun then hit his head with a flower pot. As soon as Swamy fell on the floor, he hit his head with another flower pot. Varun then slit his throat with the knife that he had kept in the gym for the purpose before dumping the body in the lift shaft.
“After murdering the victim around 12.45 pm, the accused hid the body inside the gym as he had difficulties in shifting it. At the time of the incident, there was nobody in the gym. When a few customers came for the evening session, Varun sent them back giving after cooking up a story. Later in the night, after the bank on the first floor and a fruit stall in the basement had shut for the night, Varun shifted the body around 11 pm to the basement. He kept the body in the lift shaft and escaped,” Times of India quoted an investigating officer as saying.
After killing Swamy, Varun escaped after taking away two smartphones, Rs 10,000 (five notes of Rs 2,000) and other goods that he was carrying to deliver.
The 22-year-old accused then started using the Redmi Note 3 phone and gave the other one, an HTC worth Rs 24,000, to a friend.
Unable to find the whereabouts of Swamy, his father lodged a complaint with the Byatarayanapura police on December 11, as his office was located in that area.
Meanwhile, the police discovered the body in the lift shaft in Vijaynagar but they were not aware that it was Swamy’s.
“We spoke to the online portal where the victim worked. We got to know that he was missing after he went to deliver a smartphone to a customer in Vijayanagar and it was the same building where the body was found. We also got to know from the customers that Varun had not opened the gym since Friday. We suspected his involvement and arrested him from his residence SVG Nagar in Moodalapalya on Tuesday,” said the investigating officer.
