Sandhya succumbs to injuries in hospital

Stalker charged with murder; cops have dying declaration

Sandhya Rani, who was set on fire by her ex-colleague who had been stalking her, succumbed to her injuries on Friday at Gandhi Hospital.

Lalaguda police, which had detained Vanga Karthik, 28, for attacking Sandhya on Thursday, has booked him for murder.

Sandhya Rani worked as a computer operator in a shop, Lucky Traders, in Shantinagar.

She was the sixth and youngest child of the family. Her father had passed away some time ago. Sandhya had got the job with help from Karthik. He had been proposing her for marriage and also persuading her to quit the job after he himself got fired, police said.

North Zone DCP B. Sumathi said, “Karthik had worked in the same shop but was later fired for inefficiency. By then the two had got close to each other. After he was sacked, he asked her leave the job and pressured her to marry him, which she refused to do.”

At one point, shop owner Jagan Reddy had warned Karthik not to trouble Sandhya. “She gave me the mobile he gifted her and told me about her plight, following which we warned him not to bother her,” Reddy told the police.

Karthik bought petrol in a plastic bottle from a bunk in Malkajgiri and rode to the shop on his bike.

“As Sandhya left the shop, he followed her for about a kilometre before he stopped her and picked up an argument. Things escalated when she turned down his proposal saying that she was the breadwinner of the family. Furious at this, he doused her with petrol and set her on fire with a matchstick,” she said.

“The dying declaration of the girl was recorded in which she named him. We have recovered his bike and an empty petrol bottle from him and also secured CCTV footage,” the DCP said.