CHENNAI:In a major breakthrough, three women self-help group members and four men, including two home guards, were arrested in connection with SHG coordinator R Ambika’s murder in suburban Gerugambakkam on January 24. The arrests also brought to light irregularities committed by a cooperative bank in sanctioning of loans to SHG members.The body of Ambika (38) was found with the throat slit by her husband Ravi, who works as manager at Hotel Saravana Bhavan in Parrys, near their house in Akash Nagar. Two men dressed like cops had arrived at their residence in the wee hours of January 24, claiming that they wanted to question her in connection with misappropriation of SHG funds. When Ravi briefly left the room, they kidnapped and murdered her.Registering a case under Section 302 (murder), IPC, six special police teams launched a manhunt for the killers and started looking into whether the victim was killed due to previous enmity in connection with disbursal of funds to SHG groups. The victim, as the vice-president of Jhansi Rani Seva Sangam, had secured loans worth lakhs of rupees for different groups, they learnt. “It was a difficult case, as we did not have any leads,” Additional Commissioner (L&O) P Thamaraikannan told Express. “We had to proceed cautiously because of the alleged involvement of cops,” he said.Investigation showed that Ambika had secured the loans from the Porur branch of Kanchipuram Central Cooperative Bank. Branch manager John Batcha had earlier been arrested by the economic offences wing (EOW) for alleged irregularities in disbursal of gold loans. The EOW had also detected irregularities in the sanctioning of small loans.Thamaraikannan said the victim, who was hand-in-glove with the arrested bank official, had obtained a whopping Rs 52 lakh loan from the branch by submitting bogus documents and distributed Rs 19 lakh to V Sumitra, Rs 14 lakh to S Susheela and `19 lakh to R Mala, all SHG members, for a huge commission.Meanwhile, loan records stored at the Kanchipuram Central Cooperative Bank were destroyed in a mysterious fire. “We are probing whether the three arrested SHG women had any hand in the fire incident,” the off icer said. Emboldened by the destruction of records and the manager’s arrest, the three loan beneficiaries began to default on repayments. However, Ambika now began to blackmail them that if they did not pay her Rs 15 lakh, she would expose their forgery fraud. In return - the police learnt - the victim had later complained to her friend that Susheela threatened to finish her off by hiring a killer for Rs 10 lakh.Faced with Ambika’s ultimatum that they must pay the money by January, the trio roped in a home guard S Annamuthu to kill her and doled out Rs 50,000 as advance, the senior police official said. “Sumitra met Annamuthu during the assembly elections at a polling booth and struck a friendship with him,” he said.Annamuthu enlisted the help of another home guard K Rajkumar and two others, Deepan and G Rajkumar. On the fateful morning, Annamuthu, dressed in his uniform, took Ambika from her house on the pretext of questioning her and K Rajkumar and Deepan, who were waiting for them some distance away, pounced on her and slit her throat. The special police teams arrested the three women SHG members and the four men and seized three bikes, the murder weapon and the police uniforms from the gang.
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