A city court on Wednesday remanded suspended police officer S.S.V.V. Nagaraju to 14 days of judicial custody in connection with the alleged lock-up death of 25-year-old Gade Sai Krishna. The Special Investigation Team (SIT), which had arrested the former Krishnalanka Circle Inspector on Tuesday after a grueling six-hour interrogation, produced him before the magistrate, who ordered his remand until July 8. In a damning remand report, the SIT confirmed that Sai Krishna died from severe injuries inflicted during brutal custodial torture and revealed that the police station’s CCTV footage from May 1 to June 1 was intentionally deleted to destroy evidence.
According to the SIT investigation, Sai Krishna was picked up by police in Markapuram on May 6 due to pending non-bailable warrants and was subsequently held in illegal confinement at the Krishnalanka police station before mysteriously disappearing. While a sub-inspector spotted him at the station between May 6 and May 8, the victim’s mother, Vijaya Lakshmi, testified that she saw her son lying unconscious inside the premises. The remand report further disclosed that the suspended SHO seized Sai Krishna’s mobile phone but failed to deposit it with the magistrate, and later conspired to move the body to an undisclosed location in an attempt to secretly burn or bury it. The high-level probe team, led by IG M. Ravi Prakash, stated that Nagaraju is entirely non-cooperative and is actively trying to mislead investigators as they search for where the body was disposed of.
The legal noose tightened around the police personnel following a Habeas Corpus petition filed by the victim’s mother in the Andhra Pradesh High Court, which originally directed the police to produce Sai Krishna by June 15. Following their failure to do so, the High Court set a final deadline of June 29. A formal criminal case was registered on June 19 under relevant sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) for wrongful confinement, murder, and causing the disappearance of evidence. Meanwhile, in other major regional developments, Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu officially launched India’s largest private gold mining project at Jonnagiri in Anantapur district, marking a massive milestone for Andhra Pradesh’s industrial sector.
