The wife of former Karnataka police chief Om Prakash, who has been detained after the retired officer was found brutally murdered at his Bengaluru home, suspected him of poisoning her and said she was a “hostage” in her home and that the top cop’s men tracked her.
NDTV has accessed messages sent by Om Prakash’s wife, Pallavi, to the multiple WhatsApp groups she was part of. Pallavi, the investigation has revealed, was suffering from schizophrenia and other mental health issues. Her son, too, has said in his police complaint that she had been suffering from depression. So the messages cannot be taken at face value.
In one of the messages to an IPS officers’ group, she sought urgent action against her husband, a 1981-batch IPS officer. She said Om Prakash’s revolver must be seized immediately. “I am a hostage. Always in surveillance by Omprakash’s agents wherever I go.”
She also alleged that the 68-year-old former top cop had been poisoning her. “I have been asking him to live separately for years, but to no avail. Wherever I go on my own, the same food and water poisoning starts.” Pallavi alleged that Om Prakash would get house helps to poison her food and added that her daughter Kruthi was also suffering and that she could not “sit quiet”. Kruthi has been detained with her mother and the cops are now investigating if she played a role in her father’s murder.
In one of the messages, Pallavi said even food deliveries were “adulterated” on her husband’s instructions. “Money makes everything so easy. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” she said. “What should I do? My daughter is suffering. It has started recently when she started raising her voice,” she writes in a message.
Pallavi also wrote that Om Prakash would be responsible if something happened to her or Kruthi, “however natural or accidental it might look”. She also said she had been attempting to detox herself and her daughter using “ghee and nimbu”. “With God’s grace, I have been able to detox myself every time,” she wrote in a message. Pallavi also asked other IPS officers to get the current DGP to find an alternate accommodation for her.
Pallavi wrote that she had been walking on the road one day when someone in a van “released some powder”. “I didn’t realise it until much later when my whole upper body started burning.”
She said in a group that she did not mention these occurrences earlier “because you will not believe”. “But the dark world operation is much, much different from our normal world,” she said.
The former Karnataka top cop was found dead last evening with multiple stab wounds on his body. Pallavi, it is alleged, tied him up and stabbed him to death. Om Prakash, the probe has found, had been attacked earlier too. Pallavi hit him on the head with a stone a few months back. Their son Karthikesh has alleged that his mother had been threatening his father for a week and he had moved to his sister’s home. But Kruthi went there and insisted that he return. He came back yesterday and a fresh altercation broke out soon after.
In his police complaint, which formed the basis of the FIR, Karthikesh has said, “My mother, Mrs. Pallavi, had been threatening to kill my father, Mr. Omprakash (Retired DGP and IGP), for the past week. Due to these threats, my father had gone to stay at the residence of his sister, Ms. Saritha Kumari. Two days ago, my younger sister Kruthi went to Ms. Saritha Kumari’s house and pressured my father, Mr. Omprakash, to return home. She brought him back against his will,” he has said. Kartikhesh has said he was not at home at the time of the crime and that his neighbor called and informed him that his father was lying downstairs.
“I rushed home around 5:45 pm and found police officers and members of the public present at the scene. My father was lying in a pool of blood with injuries to his head and body. A broken bottle and a knife were found next to his body. He was then taken to St. John’s Hospital. My mother, Mrs. Pallavi, and my sister, Kruthi, have been suffering from depression and used to fight with my father frequently. I strongly suspect that they are involved in the murder of my father,” he has said.
