The Hindu : Front Page : Bollywood junior artiste ‘murdered’

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Sunday, Jul 26, 2009
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Bollywood junior artiste ‘murdered’

Staff Reporter

25-year-old woman’s body found in a lodge at Ramgopalpet

Arzoo Ali was accompanied by a man when she checked into the lodge on July 19
But she was staying alone in the room; Rakesh used to drop in now and then

HYDERABAD: A Bollywood junior artiste, Arzoo Ali, was found murdered in the room of a lodge at Ramgopalpet in Secunderabad on Saturday.

The bruise on her neck with a ‘chunni’ around it suggested that the killer strangled her to death. The 25-year-old woman, accompanied by a person named Rakesh, checked into Sindhuri lodge on the night of July 19. She was staying alone in the room, but Rakesh used to drop in now and then, Inspector in-charge of Ramgopalpet, Ashok Chakravarty, said. Mentioning that he was an employee of TVS Electronic, Rakesh had entered a Bangalore address in the lodge register.

The laundry worker of the lodge went to her room around 8 a.m. to collect clothes for washing. The worker left after the artiste said no. An hour later, the lodge boys knocked on Arzoo’s door to ask if she wanted breakfast and then rang up the landline phone in her room as there was no response.

The lodge manager smelt a rat as the artiste did not come out of the room even after 2 p.m. He opened the room with a duplicate key and found her lying dead on the floor. She was clad in a ‘kurta’. An amount of Rs.6,000 was intact in her handbag, but the mobile phone she used was missing. The police could not reach Rakesh on his mobile phone as it was switched off.

The lodge workers gave conflicting versions. Some said they saw Rakesh around the previous night, while others maintained he did not turn up for the past three days. Arzoo, a resident of Santa Cruz in Mumbai, used to work for a Bollywood film shooting company.

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