Karnataka   

When Acid Raja struck terror in the city

The police are still groping in the dark to trace the man who threw acid on 23-year-old Nilshu Gupte while she was riding pillion with her husband on a motorcycle in HSR Layout earlier this month.

The police suspect that the man could have attacked Ms. Gupte in a case of mistaken identity. In most of the acid attack cases reported from the city in the past decade, the victims were mainly young women. The victims usually knew the men who resorte d to the crime after their proposals of love or sexual advances were rebuffed.

However, it was not the case with several women who were victims in a series of acid attacks that rocked Bangalore in the late 1980s. The one name that several Bangaloreans still recollect with horror is that of Acid Raja, who had splashed acid on the faces of nine sex workers and eight policemen, including a sub-inspector.

Sex workers and police constables in the city were gripped by a fear psychosis until the then Cubbon Park sub-inspector, B.B. Ashok Kumar, arrested Raja in 1990. On January 26, 1990, Nagaraj, a constable attached to the Cubbon Park police station, was guarding a car at the parking lot on King’s Road when a man wearing a monkey cap came on a Luna moped and threw acid on his face.

Within a span of a few months, the Luna-borne man splashed acid on five more constables, all of whom were on duty at parking lots in Cubbon Park, Commercial Street and Ashoknagar police station limits.

During the investigation, Mr. Ashok Kumar came across Reshma, a sex worker, who provided crucial information about Raja: he used to steal Fiat cars, extort money from sex workers and throw acid on them if they refused to entertain him.

Mr. Ashok Kumar questioned all the nine sex workers on whom Raja had thrown acid, and gathered valuable information that led him to Raja’s house in Ramamurthynagar.

On reaching Raja’s house, the police saw cans of acid, car stereos and other accessories packed in the attic. “Finally, when he came home at 11.30 p.m., we overpowered and caught him,” recollects Mr. Ashok Kumar who is now Assistant Commissioner of Police (J.C. Nagar sub-division).

After Raja was arrested and charge sheeted by the police, he was convicted by the court. On his release in 1994, after a four-year jail sentence, Raja threw acid on the face of a sub-inspector attached to the Commercial Street police station. Subsequently, the then Commercial Street Police Inspector, Victor S. D’Souza, arrested him.

After being out of view for a few years, Raja surfaced in Mysore some time ago and was arrested by the police there.

Though no one knows where he is now, the police rule out his involvement in the attack on Ms. Nilshu Gupte.

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