CHENNAI: Her killer had got away with he wanted to accomplish. But for no reason honour evaded S Swathi for hours even after death. Her body, fallen face down in a pool of blood, was lying for nearly two hours on the Nungambakkam railway station platform. Not just the glances of passersby, but even flies mobbed her body.
Even though police personnel reached the spot, the process to remove the body from the spot did not start immediately. Presence of mind of the cops worked only to the extent of procuring a few shirts from the local shops and spreading them on the body to hide the bloodshed that an unidentified psychopath had inflicted on the techie.
Only after a senior Railway Police officer reached the station, by when it was already two hours since Swathi breathed her last, things started moving. In a big black sheet her body was bundled and taken away to the Rajiv Gandhi Government General Hospital, where the victim's relatives and friends had assembled.
Referring to her as a "silent girl", her friends were still puzzled as to whom she could have antagonised so much to deserve this. “I have known her for the past three years and she had never complained about any anonymous calls or any problems. This is a shock for all off us. She was a very helpful person,” said a friend.
Swathi had completed graduation at Dhanalakshmi College of Engineering and joined Infosys in 2014 and started working at the Infosys campus in the Mahindra World City.
K Govindarajan, a relative, blamed the weak vigilance at the railway stations that allowed such a brutal murder to take place.
Swathi's father Santhana Gopalakrishnan, a retired Central government employee, was questioned by the police officers in a room in the railway station. Swathi's house at South Gangai Amman Koil Street was filled with grieving relatives.
The Railway Police officers, who were busy with the investigations, were unavailable for comments on the delay in removing the body from the spot. But after hours of investigations, police found a video grab of a CCTV camera in a nearby premises which recorded a young man with a back-pack hurriedly walking in a narrow street at Choolaimedu.
From accounts of eyewitnesses, police suspect the man recorded in the video to be the killer and are tracing him.
Speaking to Express, a senior Government Railway Police official said, "We have got some leads and are presently working on the case. The person seen in the footage is our prime suspect. We have formed five special teams to track him down."
Meanwhile, Infosys issued a statement condoling the death of Swathi and have promised to work with the local authorities to crack the case.