It could be a normal parcel delivery, but it was not for the 29- year- old Flipkart delivery man who was murdered by a customer who could not pay for the phone he ordered online.
22-year-old gym trainer K Varun Kumar did not have money to pay for his brand new Redmi Note, and allegedly killed and dumped the man’s body in the lift shaft of a building in Vijayanagar area. The Bengaluru police said that Vijay needed a phone urgently after joining his gym ten days ago as all his friends and clients in the gym had a phone.
He asked his father who is a mechanic to lend him the amount but he refused to do so and said that he didn’t have enough cash and now when he had started working, he should fund his expenses on his own. Police said that Varun then decided that killing the delivery agent would be the only way to own the phone and hatched a plot to execute it.
On December 8, he ordered the phone and gave the gym’s landline number, a day later, around 12.30 pm, Swamy called up Varun from near the building who asked him to come to the second floor. Varun, who did not have money, tried to snatch the smartphone from Swamy. The victim, however, managed to overpower Varun and ran out of the gym; Varun then hit his head with a flower pot.
When Swamy fell, the accused attacked him again with another flower pot kept in the gym’s passage. After the victim lost consciousness, Varun slit his throat with the knife that he had kept in the gym for the purpose. The police said that after slitting the victim’s throat, Varun watched him bleed to death. He dumped the body in the lift shaft only after about 10 hours.
Varun then escaped after taking two smartphones, Rs. 10,000/- and other goods to be delivered which were in the delivery bag. He then started using the Redmi phone and gave the other one, an HTC worth Rs 24,000, to a friend.
The police have booked him for under IPC 302 (murder) and IPC 397 (robbery). “It was a pre-planned murder as he had kept the kitchen knife in the gym a day before the phone was to be delivered,” said DCP MN Anuchet.