TIRUPUR: Udumalaipet’s infamous reputation against people in love continues. This time though, the lovers who allegedly committed suicide, were from the same community. Their bodies were found in a car floating in a PAP canal on Monday. Like a scene out of movies from the 80s’, the man fell in love with a woman from the same community but from a less affluent background and the man’s family was against their match.G Arun Shankar (35) from Udumalaipet and G Manjula ( 30) were the couple in love. Arun lived in State Bank colony, Udumalai. He was running a car alignment service centre. Manjula was from Bodipatti near Udumalai. Both were from the same community.
Arun’s family was not interested in the marriage as they were unhappy with Manjula’s not so well-to-do background. Police sources said that initial talks of marriage were on between the two families, but Arun’s family declined the proposal citing mismatch in financial backgrounds. Following this, the couple went missing on February 20 and a missing complaint was even filed with the Udumalai police station.
On Monday morning, people from Chinna Pappanoothu near Udumalai saw a car in the PAP canal. They alerted Dhali police. With the help of fire service, the car was taken out. Inside the car, two bodies were found in highly decomposed state. The bodies were later identified to be that of Arun Shankar and Manjula. The bodies were sent to Udumalai GH for postmortem examination.
Since the canal runs deep, the car had not been very visible. However, police suspected that the car had fallen into the canal somewhere else and had been washed here by the water current. Finally, someone spotted the car near Chinna Pappanoothu on Monday morning. Police registered a case. Though the cause of death was not clearly known, an FIR suspecting it to be suicide was registered and Udumalai police were investigating. The case begged investigation as Udumalpet was in news once over a honour killing case, in which the judge famously found girl’s family guilty.