Watchman sleeps after watching his boss’s murder!

PNS|Vijayawada

How is it possible for anyone to sleep in the house where a person has been murdered in the dead of night? How is it possible for anyone not to share such a gory incident with anyone? You guessed it right. The person being referred to is Rangaiah, watchman at the residence of late YS Vivekananda Reddy.

The volte-face of Rangaiah from the time of his Narco test (including polygraph and brain mapping test) to the time he made his statement u/s 164 smacks of a conspiracy. He said he knew nothing about the incident during the Narco test. However, he came up with many details when his statement was recorded u/s 164. Rangaiah claimed he heard screams in the house of Vivekananda Reddy on the night of March 14, 2019. He deposed that when he peeped into the window, he saw four persons, namely, Yarra Gangi Reddy, Umashankar Reddy, Sunil Yadav, and Dastagiri.

How come Rangaiah failed to identify the screams of Vivekananda if they emanated from the latter’s house? If he had recognised the screams of his master, why did he not think it fit to call the neighbours for help? Had he raised an alarm, he probably could have saved Vivekananda. Rangaiah deposed in his statement that while three others had left the place, Yarra Gangi Reddy accosted him and threatened him not to reveal the incident to anyone.

He claimed that after Gangi Reddy too had departed from the scene, he entered the house and saw Vivekananda Reddy lying in a pool of blood.

If this were true, why didn’t it occur to him to call anyone to the place? On top of it, he claimed that he went to sleep at the place thereafter.

This is the big factor in the whole episode. How could Rangaiah go to sleep at the house with no one for company except for his master’s body after his gruesome murder? This is a superhuman act as it calls for extraordinary courage to sleep under such circumstances.

Rangaiah, who shared so much information with CBI while making his statement u/s 164, did not say a word during the Narco test conducted by the SIT in Gandhnagar, Gujarat. One wonders how he could make such a detailed statement to the CBI two years later. Did the CBI employ Telugu translators to record his statement for CBI officials who do not understand Telugu?

The contradictions in Rangaiah’s response to the Narco test conducted by the SIT and the statement recorded by the CBI u/s 164 give rise to many a suspicion about the veracity of his submissions. In 2019, Rangaiah told probe agencies that he did not hear or see anything during the fateful night. He confessed that he woke up in the morning and tried to open the main door which was locked from the inside and he took another door to enter the building. After seeing the dead body of YS Viveka, he immediately informed Viveka’s PA Krishna Reddy who, in turn, informed family members. The statement recorded by CBI u/s 164 is a complete U-turn from Rangaiah’s earlier confession.

The loose ends in the investigation can be connected only when the investigation is tightened to move in the right direction.