Man in Andhra Pradesh Kills 10 People by Offering Them Holy Food Secretly Laced With Cyanide

Just as the country is recovering from the gruesome cyanide murders carried out by a woman on her family over 14 years in Kerala, yet another instance of using the deadly chemical to kill has come up. A man from the city of Eluru in Andhra Pradesh, Vellanki Simhadri alias Siva, and his friend Ameenullah Babu were arrested by the police for the alleged murder of ten people from January 2018 to as recently as last month. And what’s even more blood-curdling is how these murders were committed.

Police reports say that while Simhadri was working as a watchman, he would pretend to be a realtor and trick people into thinking he had supernatural powers. He would scam people by claiming to have hidden treasure and precious stones, even promising them that he could double their wealth and cure chronic diseases like diabetes. But his main game was promising to give people a ‘rice-pulling coin’—a special symbol that many believe attracts prosperity by magnetically attracting grains of rice—in exchange for large sums of money or jewellery. And once he had successfully conned his victims, he would hand over the coin along with a special prasadam, a type of holy food offering, that he had laced with cyanide, leading to the instant death of anyone who consumed it without leaving behind any traces.

“Since there were no visible injuries on the victims, the relatives also did not suspect any foul play by anybody. Moreover, Simhadri used to take a long gap between two murders and choose different places, nobody suspected him,” West Godavari superintendent of police Navdeep Singh Grewal said at a press conference.

However, this sinister plot came to light when the police were investigating the death of a government teacher in Eluru, K Nagaraju, who died mysteriously after he had left his house with all his cash and jewellery, having told his family that he was going to deposit it into the bank. While they initially thought he had suffered from a stroke or heart failure, upon the family’s insistence, they investigated further and found a connection to Simhadri after scouring through CCTV footage and narrowing down on him as the last person to have met Nagaraju. Eventually, he confessed to his own crime after the police found that he had been in contact with ten other victims who had died suspiciously in the areas of Krishna, East Godavari and West Godavari. The cops then launched a full-fledged investigation and have now even alleged that he killed his own grandmother, sister-in-law, landlady and religious preacher.

“After convincing them to bring their cash and valuables, Simhadri took them to isolated places where he performed certain rituals. He also used to make them believe that he had knowledge of hidden treasures in the forests,” Grewal said. While most murders were committed by offering people the poisonous prasadam, some doses of cyanide were even administered through Ayurvedic medicines that people bought from him.

Through his shady tactics, he managed to amass more than Rs 24 lakhs ($33,844) and 35 sovereigns of gold. While Simhadri was the face of the operation, it was Babu who would procure the cyanide from his brother’s nickel-coating shop. To gather enough evidence to convict the accused, police now plan to conduct autopsies on three of his victims who were buried instead of being cremated.

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