Parents of Anupam Ujjwal Tiru (above) at their Ranchi home on Friday. Picture by Hardeep Singh

Ranchi, June 3: The capital, which is grappling with the trauma of two teenagers dying mysteriously on Mumbai’s railway tracks, has been jolted by another shocking news of an engineer from the city being found dead inside an IOCL refinery in Haryana.

Anupam Ujjwal Tiru (30), a BIT-Mesra alumnus and son of a retired judge and a Ranchi Women’s College professor, had been working as a senior electrical engineer with the oil major at its Panipat refinery for three years.

On May 30, he entered the company premises at 8pm for his night shift and reportedly made last contact with his colleagues over walkie-talkie around 12.30am. On May 31 morning, his body was found floating in a reservoir, about 3km from his office on the premises. His walkie-talkie, two mobile handsets, garments, helmet, wallet and identity card were found on the embankment.

The same day, company officials informed Anupam’s parents that he had drowned and that a case of unnatural death had been registered with Refinery police. However, mother Beena Tiru, a history professor, refuses to accept it was an accident and has hinted at murder.

“My son did not know how to swim. Why would he take a dip in a reservoir, that too at night and while on duty? In fact, why would he bathe in a reservoir when he had a proper washroom at his office? I also saw bruises on one foot and his right hand,” Beena Tiru wrote in her letter to the Panipat superintendent of police after she received her son’s body yesterday.

When The Telegraph contacted her at their residence at Magistrate Colony in Doranda after she and her husband, Jaiwant Tiru, a retired additional district judge of Simdega, returned after Anupam’s last rites at GEL Church Cemetery, the bereaved mother was more vocal: “It is a cold-blooded murder. I suspect that someone assaulted my son and threw him into the reservoir to make it look like an accident,” she said.

While Beena remained tight-lipped when asked why she suspected her son was killed, a family member said the youth had blown the whistle on the oil mafia. “He had apparently lodged a complaint against some rogue elements who had penetrated the company echelons. Anupam had been disturbed since,” he said, requesting anonymity.

On whether suicide was a possibility, Beena said: “Our son cannot commit suicide. He was not depressed and was doing well in his career. He completed his graduation in electrical engineering from BIT-Mesra and landed a plum job. Recently, he had also qualified the Indian Engineering Service (IES) exam. He had never expressed any dissatisfaction with his life, why would he kill himself?” she said. Her husband nodded. The couple is yet to receive a reply from the Haryana police.

On May 19, the bodies of two commerce students of the capital’s Gurunanak Senior Secondary School were recovered from railway tracks at Panvel in Mumbai. Amandeep Singh and Govind Rao, both 18 years old, had been missing since May 14 and diaries had been lodged at Sukhdeonagar and Chutia police stations.

Maharashtra police registered a case of unnatural deaths, saying the boys committed suicide. The parents of the teenagers, however, denied it.

The controversy prompted Ranchi SSP Praveen Kumar to send a team to Maharashtra for investigations. The team is yet to return.