Andhra Pradesh - Visakhapatnam   

Scrap dealer's murder: eight held

Staff Reporter

Rs. 8.93 lakhs seized from assailants

THE BOOTY: Deputy Commissioner of Police (L &O) Bhavana Saxena showing a picture of the house where the accused in the murder of the scrap auctioneer had stayed in Visakhapatnam, at a press meet on Tuesday. --Photo: C.V. Subrahmanyam

VISAKHAPATNAM: In a major breakthrough, the city police on Monday arrested eight persons and seized Rs.8.93 lakhs from them in connection with the sensational murder of scrap auctioneer Samudrala Satyanarayana alias Baby Rao. The arrests have pointed to a nexus between scrap merchants and a scrap mafia gang based in the north. Baby Rao was walking on the road in front of his newly constructed house at Karasa on June 29 when two persons approached him on a motorcycle and fired three rounds killing him.

Extortion

They found that one Amit Singh was running a scrap mafia gang from Kolkata. He was collecting `goonda tax' at the rate of Rs.200 a tonne from the scrap auctioneers who participate in the scrap bidding by railway zones.

The auctioneers who refused to pay were either threatened or killed.

The city police teams found that scrap merchants Md. Moosa, Vadrevu Simhachalam, T. Kishore Kumar, Sumon Prakash Sarogi (of Visakhapatnam) and Sunkara Vasu of Vijayawada had approached scrap mafia leaders of Kolkata and sought their permission to participate in the scrap auctions in South Eastern and Eastern Railway zones.

Mafia pact

They entered into an agreement with the mafia leaders that scrap merchants from Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu would pay Rs.200 as `goonda tax' for each tonne of iron scrap.

Baby Rao was not interested in the agreement. After paying the `goonda tax' for a year, he stopped paying and some other merchants followed suit. This infuriated the mafia gang and they sent Rupesh Kumar Singh and Ghora Pahilwan to Visakhapatnam to kill him.

The two accused took a house on rent at Akkayyapalem and purchased a second-hand motorcycle. They surveyed the area for three days before killing Baby Rao at Old Karasa. "On a tip off, the city police arrested Suseel Kumar Kesari and Rajeev Ranjan Prasad of Ranchi at Ramakrishna Beach while they were receiving a bag containing Rs.5.93 lakhs from S. Vasu, a scrap merchant of Vijayawada. The amount was collected from scrap dealers of Vijayawada and Hyderabad as `goonda tax'. Based on their confession, four scrap dealers from Vizag were arrested and Rs.3 lakhs seized from themA motorcycle without numberplate was also seized from the shelter of the accused at Akkayyapalem, the Deputy Commissioner of Police (Law and Order) Bhavana Saxena told a press meet on Tuesday. She said that the prime accused Rupesh and Ghora were still at large.

Additional Deputy Commissioner of Police P. Rama Rao and Assistant Commissioner of Police (north) Y. Prem Babu were present at the media conference.

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