IBM Employee In Bengaluru Killed Allegedly With Laptop Cord

Kusum Singla, 31, an IBM employee, was murdered two days ago by a man she had befriended on social media and invited to her Bengaluru apartment, the police said today.

They said they have swiftly solved the murder with the arrest early this morning in Haryana of a man called Sukhbir Singh.

Ms Singla was found dead in her south-east Bengaluru apartment by her flatmate after the latter returned from work at about 7.30 pm on Tuesday. She had been hit with a sharp object and was strangled with the cord of her laptop, the police said. “She was lying in a pool of blood. Our team spent six to seven hours at the scene of crime and identified the suspect,” said senior police officer P Harisekharan. The case he said was cracked in three hours and Sukhbir was tracked through social media posts and cell phone records.

Sukhbir Singh and Kusum Singla, the police said, had met each other on a social networking site about three months ago. The man had sent a request to connect and Ms Singla had accepted. They had also exchanged phone numbers. Sukhbir, the police said, had arrived in Bangalore from Haryana on Tuesday and reached Ms Singla’s home at about noon. The woman, the police said, asked the security guard to let him in. From Sukhbir’s initial interrogation the police have allegedly learnt that Ms Singla also ordered lunch, but then the two had an altercation over money. Sukhbir had asked her for Rs. 50000 and later said he would settle for 5000, and also that he needed the money to buy a plane ticket back to Haryana. The police said Ms Singla refused to give him anything and he allegedly killed her in a fit of rage.   The murderer, the police said, left the flat at about 3.15 pm, taking with the victim’s ATM cards and cheque books. Not much is known yet about Sukhbir Singh and where he is from. He is being brought to Bengaluru for further interrogation. Kusum Singla was from Punjab and was transferred by her company to Bengaluru from Noida in August last year.