A 64-year-old retired man, originally from Kerala, was found brutally murdered at Samachar Apartments in east Delhi’s Mayur Vihar on Wednesday afternoon by his daughter.
A 64-year-old retired man, originally from Kerala, was found brutally murdered at Samachar Apartments in east Delhi’s Mayur Vihar on Wednesday afternoon by his daughter. The unidentified assailant escaped with a LCD television from his flat.
Vijaykumar P.B. had moved to Delhi in 1994 and retired from the Central Government Health Services (CGHS) in 2011. He would have turned 65 on Friday.
He had sustained multiple stab injuries, mostly in his abdominal region and arms, inflicted with a small, sharp object, like a fruit knife, by someone suspected to be known to him, the police said.
He lived on the third floor of a building in Samachar Apartments. His daughter Ambily Vijaykumar works as a producer with the Rajya Sabha TV channel and his son is a journalist in Dubai.
Vijaykumar and his wife, an income-tax department employee, had moved to the complex around three months ago and lived in a flat close to their daughter’s flat in another building in the same complex.
Vijaykumar’s daughter, who used to visit her parents every day, found his body when she went to check on her father at 2 pm as he was not taking phone calls for a long time and her mother was at work.
She found her father lying in a pool of blood, with his semi-nude body under a mattress in the bedroom. She raised an alarm and the neighbours rushed to the flat and called up PCR. The flat was not found in a ransacked condition and no cash or jewellery was found missing. “A case of murder has been registered and preliminary investigation suggests that the assailant was known to the victim. The assailant was given a friendly entry and was offered tea and biscuits,” DCP (East) Rishipal Singh said.
From preliminary investigation, it appears that the assailant took away an LCD television from the house to elude security guards in the complex, pretending to be a mechanic, Mr Singh said.
“I regularly called him on his mobile phone to check on him in the afternoon and he’d pick up my call instantly. But today the phone went unanswered. I then drove to his home and found the grilled door left ajar. I felt something suspicious. I kept calling out for dad, but got no response,” his daughter told PTI.
“Moments later, I found the bedroom door half-open. I was feeling more and more suspicious that something was amiss. The light was switched off in the room. Then I found the wall stand for the TV lying on the sofa. So, I checked up for the TV, and found it missing. Then I saw a mattress lying on the floor and couldn’t see anything more as the light wasn’t switched on. It was then that I pulled over the mattress, and there I found my dad dead, lying naked in a pool of blood,” she said.
“We had moved into Samachar Apartments in 2012 and my father moved this March. My father was to celebrate his 65th birthday on July 22,” she said.
Senior police officials along with forensic experts reached the flat and lifted important evidence from the murder scene.
