Latest tech helps police crack cases in no time

Ongole: The state police are now being successful in cracking cases even for more than a decade after committing gruesome crimes. In one such case, Prakasam police arrested two persons for their involvement in a murder. In this case, one of the accused joined police department as a home guard after committing the crime and dismissed from the service for his aggressive behaviour towards a colleague.

On the intervening night of July 21-22, 2005, a 40-year-old man Elchuri Raghu Ramaiah is travelling from Kavali to his home at Tanguturu in his car. When three people, Chenikala Madhavaiah, Gothula Chandrasekhar and Pulivarti Seetaramaiah- all natives of Ulavapadu mandal stopped the car at Ulavapadu and requested for lift to Singarayakonda, he obliged and offered back seat.

As the car moves on, Madhavaiah and Chandrasekhar hatched a plan to kill the driver and escape with the new car. Afraid of his friends’ words, Seetaramaiah stopped the car and returned to Ulavapadu. Later, Chandrasekhar killed the driver and took control of car and asked Madhavaiah to drive the car. In the hurry, Madhavaiah hit the road divider and punctured the front tyre.

Later they took the car into Singarayakonda-Sanampudi road and stopped at a secluded place. They took Rs 600 with the driver and killed him by beating with boulders on his head. On the next day, they confessed about the murder to their friend Seetaramaiah, who offered shelter to the duo. The murder of Raghuramaiah created a sensation as the police are unable to trace the culprits.

They probed it for two years and closed the case as untraceable. In 2014, the AP and TS police procured a software Automated Fingerprint Identification System from Papillon, which supplies similar tools and software to FBI and other agencies. The software runs checks on fingerprints available with the department and compares with fingerprints found in the crime scenes.

It already identified nearly 15,000 matches in the pending and closed cases. In the recent update of software, the police can match 300 new sets of fingerprints and one of them matched the fingerprints with the murder of Raghuramaiah to Seetaramaiah who is an accused in a theft case in 2007. The police connected the dots and arrested Seetaramaiah and got information of two murders.

To their surprise, the prime accused in the case, Madhavaiah worked in the police department as a home guard between 2009-11. He is reported to be aggressive with his colleagues and dismissed from the service on similar reasons. The second accused, Chandrasekhar died in road accident in 2008.

Director of State Fingerprints Bureau V Somasekhar Reddy said that few finger prints will smudge and overlap at the time of taking them from accused or in the meantime of investigation so that the matching of them is hard.

He said the new technology available with police is proving to be more trustworthy and are helping them in identifying culprits with criminal background. SP Bhusarapu Satya Yesubabu said that everyone who commits crime will be brought before the court of law by police now or later.