Breakthrough in Araku killings

Visakhapatnam: The Special Investigation Team (SIT), which is probing the sensational murders of MLA Kidari Sarveswara Rao and former MLA Siveri Soma at Araku valley last week, has managed to get a major clue that might unravel the mystery surrounding how Maoists got to know about the vicitms' movements and why they had eliminated them.

According to reliable sources, one Yedela Subba Rao, a follower of slain MLA Sarveswara Rao who is also a close relative of Soma, allegedly passed on the information of their movements to the Maoists. He, however, told the police that he did not know that they were planning to kill them.

They told him that the Maoists, whose sympathiser he is, threatened him with dire consequences if he did not pass on the information on their movements.

The police officials, who interrogated Soma’s relatives and a few other local leaders, now have enough circumstantial evidence to go after Subba Rao to know the whereabouts of the Maoists who killed the two people's representatives.

The SIT, after the murder of the two leaders, concentrated their attention on their followers and working on the hypothesis that the Maoists could not have murdered them without someone close to them passing on valuable information on their movements to the Maoists. It examined the call data of their mobile phones before and after the twin murders and later took some of them into custody and questioned them.

During the course of interrogation, Subba Rao admitted that he had passed on the information about the whereabouts of the two leaders to the Maoists. He also revealed that he provided shelter for the Maoists on a few occasions earlier but had said that he had never thought they would kill Soma and Sarveswara Rao