In a gory incident, said to be the first of its kind, an unidentified attacker stabbed four passengers sleeping in a darkened RTC super luxury bus as it sped towards Chennai early on Thursday morning. Three of his victims died while Juvvala Ramesh, a software engineer working for TCS in Chennai, survived the assault, which took place near Tada in Nellore district at 4 am.
The victims were seated on seats no. 24, towards the rear of the bus, and 2 and 5, and were stabbed in the chest. None of the victims were related. The bus, coming from Bhadrachalam and carrying 24 passengers, had stopped at Sullurpeta 20 minutes before the attack.
Killer wore red shirt, black pants
Driver M.K. Khan stopped the bus only when Juvvala Ramesh, a TCS employee, raised an alarm after he saw the man stabbing one of the victims, identified later as K. Rambabu, a corn dealer. The assailant stabbed Mr Ramesh, who was sitting in the front half of the bus. There was no trace of the assailant, with neither the two drivers on the bus nor the passengers able to identify him. Police ruled out the possibility of the attacker being Psycho Samba, who had escaped from custody recently, or Anthony, a Kerala criminal on the run in AP.
Ravikumar, who was sitting next to one of the victims, said the passengers were terrified after they saw blood and dead bodies. The second driver, Alla Sammaiah, called the 108 service from a passenger’s cellphone. Rambabu, who was bleeding profusely, died by the time the ambulance reached a government hospital in Gummadipundi in TN. The staff refused to treat Ramesh citing the absence of doctors.
The bus followed the ambulance and the hospital staff bandaged Mr Ramesh’s wounds. The ambulance and the bus then went to a hospital in Sullurpeta, the town nearest to Tada. Mr Ramesh was shifted to Nellore. Police sources said that the suspect was wearing a red shirt with black stripes and black trousers. He was bald and was around 5 ft 4 in tall. The police has formed seven teams to hunt for him, said Nellore SP B.V. Ramana Kumar. Police suspects that the assailant was targeting one of the victims; he killed the other two to divert the attention of police. He struck at Mr Ramesh as he was the only witness. The dog squad led the cops till the bus stop near an ITI. Police said they found a blood stain near the ITI.
One of the victims, Utpala Niranjan, was on his way to Chennai to collect his PhD from Anna University. He was working as a lecturer in St Anns Engineering College at Chirala. His body lay in the bus till the evening, as ther was no space in the mortuary. No one came to claim the body of Ajay Biswas, who hails from Malkangiri in Odisha, till the evening.