BANGALORE: In a scene straight out of a potboiler movie, a realtor was chased and hacked to death in a house in a narrow bylane of Chamarajpet 4th main road by four men wielding lethal weapons. A police patrol team in the vicinity heard the commotion, rushed to the scene and chased the killers, finally apprehending two of them.
The hot pursuit spanned a couple of kilometres, involved a Hoysala patrol jeep, a bike-borne policeman and a BMTC bus that the two arrested killers had boarded and ended with the one of the arrested killers trying in vain to sprint away from the biker cop.
Police said the victim was Manjunath alias Elaneeru Manja, 30, who had grown from being a tender coconut seller to a real estate agent. A resident of Vitthal Nagar near Chamarajpet, Manjunath was headed to a gym when he was accosted by the four assailants near Ganesha temple at T R Mill Circle. The men attacked him with pepper spray but Manjunath fled from the place and entered a house in one of the bylanes.
The four men entered the house and hacked him to death. On their way out of the lane, the killers were accosted by Manjunath, a constable with Chamarajpet Police station, on his Cheetah. He alerted a Hoysala patrol vehicle nearby. Assistant sub-inspector Nagaraj and driver were in the patrol jeep.
Seeing the police team, the assailants fled. While two of them threw police off their trail, the other two were not so lucky. They boarded a running BMTC bus. The jeep and the Cheetah bike chased the bus. The jeep overtook the bus and got it to halt. One of the duo was apprehended, while the other jumped out of the front door and took to his heels. Manjunath chased him for half-a-km before catching him.
Shivaraj of Bapuji Nagar and Ravi from Byatarayanapura, both in their late twenties, were the arrested youths. They revealed that the attack was allegedly led by Bore Gowda, a debtor of victim Manjunath.
