LUCKNOW — Throwing away empty beer cans, can sometimes help in unravelling a murder mystery.
Discarded beer cans at some distance from a crime scene, helped police in Uttar Pradesh's Kakori, probing the murder of a 35-year-old man, nail the accused.
Amit Raidas, a moneylender by profession, had left home on May 19 saying that he was going to recover loans from a few people.
"The following day, his body was recovered from Sakra village on the Lucknow-Kakori highway. Six police teams were made to crack the case," said DCP (West Zone) Rahul Raj.
"From near the crime scene, three beer cans and a few snuffed beedis were recovered. We took the beer cans and scanned the codes on the cans. It emerged that the cans were brought from the same shop," the police official said.
The beer shop was located 2 km from the crime scene. In between, there were two villages, Sakra and Dona, where Raidas had customers who used to regularly take money on interest.
"We scanned the CCTV footage from the shop for two days preceding the murder and showed them to the victim's family members," Raj said.
[bsa_pro_ad_space id=1]The family identified one Birju Sharma, 28, who had stood surety for a few debtors.
The police team interrogated him while his phone records showed his presence at the crime scene on the fateful day.
"Birju spilled the beans and told us that his friend Sumit, who had taken a loan of Rs 30,000 from Raidas in January, died in an accident later," said the officer.
He was scared since he had stood surety for Sumit and Raidas was forcing him to arrange the money from Sumit's family.
Birju had a verbal spat with the victim on May 18. Raidas had then threatened to go to the police.
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After this, Birju with his friends Satendra Kumar, 21, and Nasimuddin Ali, 43, plotted to kill Raidas. They called him to the spot on the pretext of returning the money and bludgeoned him to death.
All the three have now been arrested.