By IANS,
Bangalore: A man, alleged to have raped and killed at least 18 women in the past five years, was arrested in Karnataka’s Mangalore town, police said Wednesday.
“Accused Mohan Kumar alias Anand (46) has been arrested under the Indian Penal Code (IPC) 302 and 376 for his alleged involvement in rape and murder of 18 or more women in the last five years,” Mangalore Superintendent of Police A.S. Rao told IANS by phone.
Kumar will be brought before a court Thursday for police remand to interrogate him in several cases of missing women from towns and villages of Dakshina Kannada district, Rao said.
The accused hails from Kanyana in Bantwal taluk, about 20 km from Mangalore.
The modus operandi of Kumar, a government school teacher till 2003, was to befriend gullible women and charm them to marry him, promising them a good life with wealth and property.
“The confidence trickster used to lure innocent women promising to marry them and elope with them to safe locations in other districts. He would then rape and poison them with cyanide-laced pills to prevent them from getting pregnant,” Rao said quoting from the initial confessions Kumar made to the special police team, which was investigating the cases of missing women in the coastal district.
In his statement to police, Kumar said he had eliminated at least 18 women, including 10 in Mysore, three each in Hassan and Bangalore and two at Madikeri in Kodagu district.
Three of his victims hailed from the border district of Kasargod in Kerala.
“After marrying them one after the other in a span of a few months, he would plot to kill them. On the pretext of taking the �wife’ to a distant temple, he would stay at a lodge en-route where he would give her the cyanide-laced pills and vanish,” Rao said.
Producing the accused before the media with his face covered, state’s western range Inspector General (IG) of Police Gopal Hosur said Kumar would lie low for some time before trapping his next victim.
“The serial killer used the same operandi in at least 18 murders. We don’t know yet how many more he would have raped and eliminated in such a gory manner,” Hosur pointed out.