AP court sentences 11 notorious highway killers to death

Naveen S Garewal 
Tribune News Service 
Hyderabad, May 24 

Ongole District Court in Andhra Pradesh sentenced a notorious highway serial killer Munna and ten other gang members to death on Monday.  

The gang used to stop vehicles on the highway posing as police officers and then killed the occupants. The district court found 18 people guilty for being involved in four such cases during 2018. Eleven have been sentenced to death and remaining to life and shorter jail terms. 

All the accused were found guilty of murdering seven persons in four cases in Ongole District. After killing lorry driver Ramasekhar and cleaner Perumal Subramani near Ulavapadu, the gang sold the 21.7 tons of iron in the lorry to a leading merchant in Guntur.

The bodies of the driver and cleaner from Tamil Nadu were packed in gunny bags and buried on the banks of Inumanamelluru Gundlakammavagu in Kukki Maddipadu Mandal near Parkasham in Andhra Pradesh. 

After a complaint was lodged on October 17, 2008, by Veerappan Kuppuswamy, the lorry owner, whose 21.7 tons of iron was looted, the police swung into action, initially thinking that the driver and cleaner had stolen the goods. 

The police started on an investigative trail from Durgapur in West Bengal and, in the process, discovered that it was around Ongole that one gang of Syed Abdul Samad alias Munna gang was operative.

During the trial, the police told the court that Munna tried to make preparations to flee the country. However, before he could do so, the police arrested him in the farmhouse of a former MLA in Karnataka and brought him to Ongole. The police investigation found that the Munna gang, disguised as policemen, used to stop vehicles on the highway under the pretext of checking. 

All accused gang members confessed to various acts of crime and after the trial, the court sentenced 11 people to death for murder and looted on the highway. The court had found all gang members guilty, but based on the charge sheet Munna and ten others were sentenced to death, life sentence has been given to four and seven years each to remaining.