Hyderabad, July 03: In a grim reminder of the bone-chilling murder of an MCA student at a college in Vijayawada a few years ago, an obsessed youngster attacked an 18-year-old girl with a sickle at Teegala Ram Reddy College of Technology (Polytechnic) at LB Nagar on Thursday.
Luckily, the girl, P Lavanya, is out of danger and her assailant, Sudhakar Naik, who is in fact her relative, was arrested.
It was around 8.30 a.m., when Lavanya was about to enter the computer lab that Sudhakar pounced upon her. He grabbed her by her hair and tried to slit her throat. She resisted and in the struggle that followed, sustained injuries on her face, neck and chest.
The other girls, meanwhile, recovered from the shock of the sight of this life and death struggle and raised an alarm. The 30-odd students inside the lab rushed out to Lavanya’s rescue and overpowered the maniac.
They locked him up in a room while the college management informed the police. A profusely bleeding Lavanya was shifted to a private hospital at IS Sadan and from there, to the Yashoda Hospital. ‘‘She has not suffered serious injuries on her chest. She is out of danger,’’ hospital Resident Medical Officer Dr Kishan Rao said. Just before she was shifted to the ICU, Lavanya told the media that she was being harassed by her relative.
Lavanya is in the third year of the diploma course in computer engineering while Sudhakar is a third-year computer engineering student. He was detained for shortage of attendance and was not allowed to take his second year examinations. When the police produced Sudhakar before the media, he claimed: ‘‘Her parents promised to get us married. Both of us were seeing each other for almost a year but of late, Lavanya has started avoiding me. I wanted to threaten her.’’ Lavanya’s friend Saraswati, however, said: ‘‘Sudhakar had been harassing her for the past few months but she never complained to the college management.’’ She also said Sudhakar had been repeatedly calling up Lavanya’s parents these last few days, threatening to kill her if they didn’t give her in marriage to him. College principal D Kutumba Rao said had Lavanya complained, they would have taken corrective measures.
The institute is owned by Krupakar Reddy, brother of former mayor T Krishna Reddy.
–Agencies–