By IANS,
Bhusawal (Maharashtra) : A mentally deranged man was arrested here Friday for stoning to death a sleeping man and seriously injuring another in a similar manner Thursday night. The police suspect he could be behind the killing of three people in Jalgaon last week.
The man was apprehended on the basis of the attacker’s description given by the victim’s friend who too was sleeping by his side on a concrete platform outside a grocery shop on the Station Road here, the police said.
The complainant, Ramesh Sukhlal Sadi, told the police he woke up on hearing his friend’s shriek and saw a man with dishevelled hair and wearing a red half pant running away from the spot. His friend Suresh Kadele’s head was smashed and a heavy, bloodied stone lay by his side, Ramesh told the police.
The police, looking out for the attacker, spotted another man lying unconscious outside the Bhusawal railway station some distance away, with his head similarly bludgeoned. They caught the suspected killer holding a stone in his hand about an hour later, sub-inspector Mangesh Tamhankar told IANS.
“The mentally deranged man, apparently in his mid-30s, gives his name variously as Shahu or Khairu and says in turn that he hails from Raipur (capital of Chhattisgarh) and Delhi,” Tamhankar said, adding that he has been hospitalized.
“Technically, we have not yet arrested the man as he is in an unsound state of mind and have not been able to get anything tangible out of him,” the police told IANS Saturday evening.
Bhusawal is a major railway junction on the Mumbai-Howrah route of Central Railway about 500 km from Mumbai.
In the district headquarters Jalgaon, 45 km away, Superintendent of Police Shantaram Waghmare told reporters that his men were already looking for the killer of three other people who were butchered in their sleep in the pre-dawn hours of May 24.
“Circumstances strongly suggest that the maniacal killer in all these cases could be the same,” Waghmare said. The police have prepared a sketch of the killer on the basis of his description given by eyewitnesses, he added.
The victims of the suspected serial killer in Jalgaon are 60-year-old Shantaram Jagtap, middle-aged Shantaram ‘Hamal’ (porter) and an unidentified person.
While Jagtap and the as-yet unidentified man were killed while they were asleep on a concrete platform outside a photo studio in Navipeth, Shantaram ‘Hamal’ was done to death in front of the Shivaji Sports Stadium in Jalgaon in the intervening night between May 24 and 25, the police said.
In all three cases, the killer had apparently used either a heavy stone or a cement concrete slab to smash up his sleeping victims’ heads, the police said, based on the evidence.