HYDERABAD: Five police officers from Telangana who had investigated sensational cases that ended in the conviction of the accused have been awarded the prestigious Union Home Minister’s Medal for Excellence in Investigation for the year 2021. All these cases ended in conviction of the accused due to watertight cases made against them based on strong scientific evidence. Across the country, 152 police personnel have been conferred with this honour. These include 28 women police officials.
The awardees from Telangana are N Bhujanga Rao, ACP Bhongir of Rachakonda commissionerate, who investigated the triple rape and murder case of minor girls at Hajipur. The accused, Marri Srinivas Reddy, was sentenced to death. N Shyam Prasad Rao, who is currently posted at ACP Malkajgiri, got the award for investigations in the brutal rape and murder of a six-year-old girl at Narsingi in 2017. The accused Dinesh Kumar Dharne, a migrant worker from Madhya Pradesh, was also sentenced to death.
G Shyam Sundar, then ACP Warangal and presently serving in Telangana CID, was the investigating officer of a mass murder in Gorrekunta village, where the accused Sanjay Kumar Yadav drugged nine people including five from a family and dumped them in an abandoned well. He was also sentenced to death.
Aligati Madhusudhan got the award for investigating the acid attack on a woman at Jaffarghad near Wardhannapet in 2017. The woman had married a person concealing her first marriage. Bearing a grudge, her second husband, along with his two friends, attacked her. She died undergoing treatment. The accused were sentenced to life imprisonment.
Nenavath Nagesh, sub-inspector of Kanchanbagh, got the award in a case where a teenager was brutally tortured physically and sexually by a tantrik, with the help of the teenager’s mother. The torture began after the boy started objecting to the illegal affair between his mother and the tantrik. The tantrik got life imprisonment and the boy’s mother got ten years imprisonment.
The Union Home Minister’s Medal for Excellence in Investigation was constituted in 2018, with the objective to promote high professional standards of investigation of crime and to recognise such excellence by investigating officers.
Among the personnel receiving these awards, 15 are from the CBI, 11 each from Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra, 10 from Uttar Pradesh, 9 from Kerala and Rajasthan, 8 from Tamil Nadu, 7 from Bihar, 6 each from Gujarat, Karnataka and Delhi and the remaining from other states and UTs.