The father was arrested for the murder of his daughter (Image generated using AI).
A 17-year-old girl reported missing on April 16 from Sira taluk in Karnataka’s Tumakuru district was found to have been murdered by her father over a matrimonial dispute, the police said Sunday.
The Tumakuru police have arrested the father, Thimmarayappa, 48, a resident of Nimbemaradahalli, for the murder of N T Meghana, after tracking his movements through the victim’s mobile phone data and local CCTV footage.
According to investigators, Thimmarayappa and his wife Nirmala approached the Kallambella police on April 17 to lodge a missing person’s complaint. They claimed that their teenage daughter had disappeared the previous evening. When officers questioned the parents regarding Meghana’s mobile phone, Thimmarayappa claimed that she had taken it with her.
However, a breakthrough came when the police analysed the phone’s call detail records (CDR). They discovered that an outgoing call had been made from Meghana’s phone number five days after she was reported missing.
“We managed to trace the youth who received the call from Meghana’s number,” an officer said. “During questioning, the youth revealed that an older man had approached him asking for help to remove the SIM card from a device. Before doing so, the older man had briefly placed a call to the youth’s own number to test it.”Suspecting foul play, the police reviewed CCTV footage from the location mentioned by the youth. The video identified Thimmarayappa as the man trying to dispose of the SIM card.
“We summoned Thimmarayappa to the police station for a formal inquiry. Realising that the police had unearthed a vital lead, he went absconding,” the officer added. Following his sudden disappearance, his wife filed a second missing person’s complaint, which eventually allowed tracking teams to locate and arrest him.
During the probe, the police found that Meghana was in love with a relative of her mother, which Thimmarayappa opposed. A police officer said, “Thimmarayappa wanted to marry Meghana to a man of his choice and not to Nirmala’s relative. When she refused, he decided to kill her.”
On April 16, Thimmarayappa allegedly took Meghana out to a farmland and bludgeoned her to death. “Later, he buried her body on the farm and returned home. He pretended that his daughter was and filed the missing person complaint,”
— said the officer.
The police took Thimmarayappa into custody and exhumed Meghana’s body for a post-mortem examination.
