Fruits and veggies are costlier than a human life, if the murder of a restaurant owner in Begusarai late on Monday night is any indication.

Ratish Kumar (29), the owner, whose restaurant is located near Barauni railway station, around 120km east of Patna, was shot dead by a group of criminals after he refused to provide them a lemon and onions along with the meal served to them.

Ironically, a combination of lemons and chillis is rumoured to ward off evil - Ratish, however, was not that lucky.

Police said four youths - Vijay Kumar, Kunal Kumar, Chhotelal and Dhanraj - visited Ratish's restaurant around 11.30pm on Monday and asked the eatery's employees to serve a meal to them.

They reportedly got agitated at the refusal by the employees to provide them a lemon and a few pieces of onion along with their meal.

The youths, said to be residents, left after threatening the owner with dire consequences.

"The youths returned to the hotel after an hour and fired at the owner from point-blank range, killing him on the spot," the station house officer of Barauni Government Railway Police, Janardan Prasad Singh, told The Telegraph.

The station house officer said the assailants were frequent visitors to the restaurant located in front of the railway station.

"Some other customers were also present at the hotel. However, none of them intervened," he said, adding that all the accused escaped following the incident.

The site of occurrence is hardly 100m away from the GRP under whose jurisdiction the area falls.

However, it took more than an hour for police personnel to arrive at the spot. The officers came face to face with a hostile crowd when they reached the spot to recover the body.

The station house officer, however, had a different version to narrate.

"I received information about the incident from the Barauni police station and not from any hotel employee or any resident, which caused the delay," he said.

The body was taken away from the spot for post-mortem after the intervention of senior police officers.

Agitated over the incident, a group of residents blocked National Highway 28 and disrupted the movement of traffic for more than two hours on Tuesday. They demanded the immediate arrest of the culprits.

"Incidents of murder, loot and dacoity have become the order of the day in Begusarai over the past few months," said Mrityunjay Kumar Singh, a sales representative of a drugs manufacturing company.

A senior official of the Government Railway Police said traffic was restored after senior police officers assured the crowd that the culprits would be arrested at the earliest.

The deceased's relatives have threatened to launch an agitation if the accused are not arrested within a week.