Engineer held for killing pawn broker

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The city police cracked the daytime murder of a pawn broker in Madhuravoyil that took place a month ago in the victim’s shop and arrested a computer engineer who was staying with his cousin, a constable, in Thousands Lights police quarters, after committing the murder.

The accused, Ramajayam, 28, a native of Chidambaram, was caught in Pallikaranai on Saturday when a woman and her daughter put up a fight when he tried to enter their house posing as health officer working on swine flu census and caught Ramajayam with the help of few workers from a nearby construction site.

The women — Chandra Prabha, 50, wife of a retired IFS officer, and Raji, 23, a software engineer — were not aware that they were dealing with a killer when they resisted him on Saturday. A special police team took him away for questioning as soon as he was handed over.

“After he was caught we had our doubts if he was the man behind the Madhuravoyil murder and after detailed questioning he confessed to the crime,” the police said.

Ramajayam killed pawn broker Ganesh Ram to loot the shop. However, after looting the shop he realised that most of what he had taken from the shop was fake gold.

After completing his computer science engineering from a private university in Chennai, Ramajayam had studied aviation technology in Sri Lanka. He had taken a loan and given `10 lakh to a man to start a business, but the man had vanished with his money. He then got into crime to get the money to repay the loan, he said.

The special police team was baffled as Ramajayam’s cousin, a policeman, and the residents of the police quarters had failed to identify him despite all newspapers and television channels having carried his photograph repeatedly. “Even his cousin is claiming innocence,” the police said.

A senior police official said that the reward of `25,000 announced on any information on the accused will be given to the people who caught him in Pallikaranai on Saturday. The police have picked up Jayasankar, the traffic policeman with whom the killer Ramajayam was staying, for questioning.