Amaravati: In what may be a first in India a local court in Ongole, Andhra Pradesh simultaneously sentenced Monday 12 members of a notorious gang to death. Seven others of the same gang were handed life imprisonment terms for highway robberies and murders. The judge of the eighth Additional Sessions Court, Prakasam district, found the accused guilty. He convicted them in three out of seven cases. In those incidents at least 13 people, mostly lorry drivers and cleaners, were brutally murdered. The Andhra Pradesh High Court will have to affirm the death sentence.
Syed Abdul Samad alias Munna allegedly had political connections. He formed the gang and started committing crimes in 2008. Initially, Munna was an accused in cases where some rich people were trapped in the name of finding hidden treasures. After extorting money, Munna and his accomplices would kill them.
Later, he adopted a new modus operandi. He and his gang members posed as police personnel and started committing crimes (murders and theft) on the Chennai-Kolkata National Highway-16. They used to stop unsuspecting drivers and, in the guise of inspecting the vehicle records, silently strangulate the victims. In some cases they murdered the cleaner as well. They used to make good their escape with the truckload and sell the goods, a senior police official said.
The gang hired an old godown in a village where the stolen trucks were first parked and then dismantled to be sold as scrap.
In one case, Munna and his accomplices killed the driver and the cleaner from Tamil Nadu while they were carrying a load of iron in their truck. They dumped the bodies in a rivulet. The 21.7 tonne of iron were sold to a dealer in Guntur.
Based on a complaint filed by the lorry owner V Kuppusamy, police launched an investigation.
A small clue gathered by a trainee DSP helped break the series of murders. It led to the arrest of Munna, who was hiding in a farmhouse in Karnataka that belonged to a former MLA.
Munna was later given bail. After several years of trial, the Ongole court found Munna and 18 of his gang members guilty of murders in three cases and accordingly convicted them.