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Man charged for misleading police

Houston: The police have charged a 22-year-old man for allegedly misleading law enforcement agencies probing the last month’s slaying of two Indian doctoral students on the Louisiana University campus.

Dallas Staden, 22, allegedly called authorities anonymously on December 17 and said he had direct knowledge of the killings and named several possible suspects, including himself and his friends, and cost the task force investigators thousands of man-hours following false leads, the police said.

He now faces one count of criminal mischief, said Sgt. Don Kelly, spokesman for four-agency taskforce, investigating the December 13 murders.

Mr. Staden has been in Parish Prison ever since his arrest on December 21 on an unrelated warrant.

Two Indian students — Chandrasekhar Reddy Komma, 31, a biology student from Kurnool in Andhra Pradesh, and Kiran Kumar Allam, 33, a chemistry student from Hyderabad — were killed inside a unit at the Edward Gay Apartments complex.

The information that task force investigators released on the sketches of two of the four men wanted for questioning and a model, light-coloured Oldsmobile Alero, seen in the vicinity of the complex, was valid, Sgt. Kelly said. That information came from other sources and it came in before Mr. Staden called, he said.

Authorities were searching for at least three men, and possibly four, as chief suspects in the slayings. — PTI

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