Vijayawada, April 30: The case of Panga Bhavani, a missing teenager from Hyderabad, was solved on Friday with her killer and fellow student Pappu alias Praveen Prakash confessing to have pushed her into the river Krishna from the Kanakadurga Varadhi.
The Class VI girl — police say she’s 12 but her neighbours claim she’s 14 — had left Hyderabad for Tirupati on April 21 along with her classmates Pappu, also of the same age, Sirisha and Srikanth, who is one year junior to them at school.
“From Tirupati, they arrived in Vijayawada on April 23,” Jeedimetla (Hyderabad) police inspector A Sanjeeva Rao said.
According to him, Bhavani, who was passionate about travelling, insisted on staying in Vijayawada for a few more days but the boys were home sick.
Sirisha and Srikanth, who had had enough of going around, went to the Nehru Bus Station to catch a bus to Hyderabad and were waiting for the other two who had gone to the Kanakadurga Varadhi.
Pappu and Bhavani had a heated argument on the bridge with the latter adamant on her demand that they stay back.
In the heat of the moment, Pappu pushed her from the bridge into the river underneath.
Later, he told Srikanth what had happened and the trio quietly made their way back to their respective houses in Hyderabad.
All this happened a few days ago.
Bhavani’s father, Yadagiri, in the meantime, had lodged a complaint with the police about his missing daughter.
On April 26, the Tadepalli police on the other side of the river in Guntur district fished out the girl’s body. Doctors at the Mangalagiri Government Hospital conducted post-mortem on the body and said there was no evidence of sexual abuse.
The truth came out after the Jeedimetla police took the two and Sirisha into custody and questioned them.
Pappu confessed to killing Bhavani and narrated the sequence of events right from their escapade to her death.
The police registered a case under Section 302 of the IPC against Pappu. Sanjeeva Rao said Pappu and Bhavani were classmates at the Sai Vidyaniketan in Sanjay Gandhi Nagar under Jeedimetla police limits. Srikanth is a Class V student at the same school.
Bhavani had always wanted to visit places and had, along with Pappu, visited several local places in the past but always used to return home the same day, the police said.
–Agencies