On May 9, a 16-year-old girl in Kumbaragadige village in Somwarpet taluk in the hilly district of Kodagu in Karnataka got her Class 10 results. She was the only girl to pass the exam from her school and had got good marks too. The same day, she got engaged to a 33-year-old man called Prakash Omkarappa. The District Child Protection Unit intervened in the ceremony, following an anonymous call, and made her parents promise that she would not be married off until she turned 18. Many hours later, the angry groom turned up at her house, dragged her out, beheaded her, and fled with her head. The ghastly incident sent shock waves through the State. The police tracked him down and arrested him the next day.
This incident occurred a few weeks after Neha Hiremath, a first year Masters student of Computer Applications (MCA) and the daughter of a Congress municipal councillor, was killed by her former classmate Fayaz Khondunaik in in Hubballi in north Karnataka. She had gone to college to attend an exam on April 18. As she was getting ready to leave the college campus in the afternoon, she was repeatedly stabbed to death on campus by Fayaz. Neha was allegedly close to Fayaz earlier, but had distanced herself from him.
Just hours before Neha’s death, a double murder rocked the State’s capital Bengaluru. In a park in JP Nagar, a posh locality of the city, Suresh, 46, who is married with children, stabbed his 25-year-old colleague at an event management company to death. The two were reportedly in a relationship, but she had broken it off recently. The mother of the victim, in an attempt to rescue her daughter, bludgeoned him to death with a stone, the police said.
