HYDERABAD: As she waited outside the Osmania Hospital mortuary on Monday, the last conversation she had with her now-dead husband, Bhukya Nagaraju, flashed through her mind. The man said he would come home late at night and wanted her to pick their 5-year-old daughter Sravani from school. But what Jamuna saw next was his body lying in a pool of blood with smashed head on the terrace of Sai Kalyan Residency in Yusufguda.
“I could hardly look at his smashed face even for identification purpose,” she said. Only after she was shown the CCTV footage by an SI that she identified the youngster who accompanied her husband that night. “I know Venkatesh Sukreeth. He is the son of IAS officer G Venkateswar Rao. We met Sukreet at a function. I know about the relationship my husband had with Venkatesh,” Jamuna said.
Nagaraju and Jamanu hail from Dubbatanda village iin Suryapet district. Nagaraju had been working as a driver for the IAS officer’s wife Anitha for two years now and gets a monthly salary of Rs12,000. While Rao’s residence is located at Madhuranagar, Nagraju had been living with wife and two children near Krishna Kant Park.
Jamuna recalled calling her husband on mobile phone on Saturday as he had not returned home.
“A woman answered my call stating that she saw an abandoned mobile phone at Yousufguda Crossroads. Claiming that she did not know who Nagaraju was, she asked me to come to collect phone,” she said.
“Anitha told me she was off to Chennai and would return in two days. She said we could go to the police and lodge a complaint in two days. I suspected something wrong and informed my brother Nagesh,” Jamuna said. Nagaraju’s body was handed over to his family after post mortem and taken to his native place.