The Tamil Nadu Police on Tuesday arrested three men accused of abducting and raping a college student near Coimbatore International Airport late Sunday night, following an intensive 36-hour manhunt that deployed seven special teams and nearly the entire city police force.
The three were intercepted on the outskirts of Mettupalayam on Monday night and shot in the legs after allegedly attempting to escape, Coimbatore City Police Commissioner Saravana Sundar said. “The accused were trying to escape from the spot when the police had to shoot them in the leg in Vellakinaru,” he said.
The men, identified as Guna, Karuppasamy and Karthik alias Kaleeswaran, were taken to Coimbatore Medical College Hospital. A head constable was also injured in the scuffle, police said.
Police said the survivor, a postgraduate student, was with a male friend in a parked car near the airport around 11 pm on Sunday when three men broke the window, assaulted the man, and abducted the woman. They took her to a nearby isolated shed, where she was allegedly raped. She was found at around 4.30 am on Monday and is under medical care.
A senior police officer told The Indian Express that the breakthrough in the investigation emerged from surveillance linked to a week-old vehicle theft and a citywide alert on a stolen iPhone.
“The accused had stolen a TVS 50 (two-wheeler) a week before the sexual assault. A parallel police probe on the TVS 50 was happening in which police collected dozens of CCTV clips. On Sunday night, after the crime, police assumed the accused walked out of the crime scene in the airport area, so they examined all surveillance cameras in the locality. In one of the clips, three people in the same age group were found. TVS 50 case footage matched with the three spotted in the footage from the airport area. Police also had clues leading to their likely travel to Mettupalayam,” the officer said.
The trio had also allegedly taken the survivor’s friend’s iPhone during the assault. Believing the suspects might attempt to sell it, police quietly alerted all second-hand mobile shops across Coimbatore and Mettupalayam.
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“On Monday evening, one of the three approached a shop to sell the iPhone. As the shop owner was alerted, he told the customer that he needed 10 minutes to charge the phone before he purchased it. In the meantime, the police were alerted, and a team came and picked him up. Two others were also waiting by the road in the town’s outskirts and were picked up later,” the officer said.
During questioning, the men allegedly led police to a forested area where they claimed to have hidden a knife. When they attempted to flee during the inquiry, officers opened fire, injuring them in the legs.
Police said one suspect has a prior murder case, another a robbery case, and the third is suspected in a house-theft case. All three are said to be tree-cutting workers from Sivaganga; two are brothers.
The survivor and her friend remain under treatment.
