Usha Chokhani

Kishan Yadav, the help who allegedly murdered her employer Usha Chokhani in her Mandeville Gardens flat last March, was arrested in Bangalore on Tuesday night.

“Yadav is very smart. After the murder, he did not visit his family in Bihar even once and started working as a labourer in Bangalore,” said an officer of the city police’s detective department, which carried out the arrest.

“We gave money to some youths in Yadav’s village and asked them to inform us if he returned. Last week, we came to know that he had called up the owner of a telephone booth in the village to find out how his family was. The call was traced to Bangalore,” added the officer.

Yadav had called from a booth at Garudachar near Mahadevpura, 35 km from Banglaore.

On seeing Yadav’s photograph, the booth-owner told officers of the homicide wing that he was staying in a nearby colony for the past six months and working as a labourer at a construction site.

“Yadav’s house was under lock and key when we got there. We picked him up around 9.45pm as soon as he returned home,” said Jawed Shamim, the deputy commissioner of police (detective department).

Yadav was produced in a court there and is being brought to the city on transit remand. He will be produced in Alipore court on Thursday.

On March 16, 2008, 54-year-old Chokhani, who ran a handicrafts unit, was found murdered in the Mandeville Gardens flat where she lived alone.

Her throat was pierced with a pair of scissors and there was a deep wound on her neck. A towel that had probably been used to gag Usha was found beside the body.

The investigators found that the towel belonged to Yadav, who had been hired as a help 10 days earlier, and started looking for him.

Shamim said Yadav could not rob the flat as he had to flee when her sister’s driver rang the doorbell within minutes of the murder. The driver went away when nobody opened the door. Chokhani’s sister later opened the flat with a duplicate key and found the body.