Angry relatives of a 16-year-old district-level kabaddi player, who was found murdered in a eucalyptus grove in Anekal taluk, went on the rampage, burning down a van and shattering the windowpanes of a bus on Sarjapur Road on Sunday morning.
The commotion led to a traffic jam that lasted over an hour on the road leading to Tamil Nadu. The relatives of the victim, Sashi Kumar, an SSLC student from SVP High School, were angry that the police did not take any action though he went missing on Friday. He was also a district-level volleyball player.
Sashi Kumar was part of a kabaddi team that won the district-level competition last week. The rival team members had picked up a quarrel with Sashi after the match. His brother Santosh had intervened to sort things out, but it was of no use. On Friday, some of the troublemakers arrived at Sashi’s house and took him to the eucalyptus grove near Peninsula Layout in Sarjapur. They allegedly hacked Sashi to death at the grove and fled, the police said. On Sunday morning, some passersby noticed a decomposed body and alerted the police.
The villagers staged a protest in front of the Sarjapur police station. They set fire to a Canter vehicle and broke the windscreen of a bus. The protest was called off after top police officers rushed to the spot and assured the protestors that the accused would be arrested soon. Sashi’s brother Santosh told the police that he suspected rival team members — Cutting Seena, Sadam, Devaraju, Nizam and Mahesh — to be behind the murder. The postmortem was conducted at Anekal Government Hospital.