Hyderabad couple arrested for beheading infant to ward off evil spirits on Super Blue Blood Moon

Two weeks after a three-month-old baby's severed head was found on the rooftop of a cab driver's house in Hyderabad, the police on Thursday arrested the driver and his wife for killing the infant as part of a human sacrifice.

The baby's head was found wrapped in a cloth on the terrace of Kerukonda Rajasekhar's house at Chilakanagar in Hyderabad.

Human sacrifice for woman's health

The police unearthed the entire plot despite the cabbie and his wife's efforts to cover up their crime. The cops said that couple had made the human sacrifice as part of a black magic ritual and satisfy spirits on Super Blue Blood Moon. They severed the baby' head after a tribal tantric asked them to do so in order to 'cure' the woman, who had not been keeping well.

On February 1, at around 12:45 am, the accused cabbie had gone to Secunderabad railway station and kidnapped the infant girl of a couple, who lived on the roadside, The News Minute reported. He then went to the banks of the Musi river at 2 am, chopped the child's head and threw the knife and the body into the water. He waited for the blood to coagulate and carried the head back to his house.

"Following this, Rajashekar and Srilatha performed a puja at their Chilkanagar residence, by placing the head on an altar," the police was quoted as saying by TNM. They then placed the head in the south-west corner of their terrace.

Rachakonda police commissioner Mahesh M Bhagwat said that as per the instructions given by the tantrik, the couple placed the infant's head under "the lunar eclipse light and the (light of) rising sun around 4 am.

The head was found by the cab driver's mother-in-law next morning. "What went wrong for the couple is that Srilatha's mother, who lived in a portion of the same house, discovered the head on the terrace. The woman who lived in one part of the house that had been partitioned into two sections was horrified at the sight of the severed head and alerted the neighbourhood," the police said.

How the truth came to light

After the discovery, the cab driver tried to mislead the police by saying that the head was tossed on to their terrace by somebody else.

The police  questioned 45 suspects and examined footage from over 100 CCTV cameras to find out the culprit.

However, the forensic department found a DNA match between the head and a few drops of blood on a tile of Rajashekar's house. During the interrogation, investigators also found out that Rajashekar was superstitious and Srilatha had not been keeping well for around four years.

When they arrested the couple, the cab driver confessed to his crimes and his wife admitted to supporting him.

It also came to light that they had watched voodoo videos on YouTube to perform the kshudra puja (human sacrifice).

A case  under sections 302 (murder) and 201 (causing disappearance of evidence of offence, or giving false information to screen offender) of the Indian Penal Code has been registered.