A 36-year-old man has been arrested for killing his wife and her mother-in-law, allegedly because they objected to his extramarital affair, at Pubilanka village in Sithanagaram district of east Andhra Pradesh’s Godavari district in the early hours of Tuesday, police said.
A police official from Sithanagaram police station told reporters that the accused, Choddadasi Seetharamaraju, alias Bandu, attacked his wife Latha (32) with a knife and stabbed her to death before killing her mother Gummadi Lakshmi (50), who tried to stop him.
Seetharamaraju has been married to Latha for about 15 years and has three children. “In the past few days, there have been clashes between husband and wife over his alleged extramarital affair with another woman from the same area,” the police official said.
Since then, the couple had been living separately due to an ongoing domestic dispute and the wife and her children were staying with her mother.
“On Monday night, Seetharamaraju went to her house around midnight with three of her friends and quarreled with them. In a fit of rage, he attacked the two women with a knife, killing them on the spot,” the police official said.
After committing the crime, the accused disposed of the weapon in the Godavari river and later surrendered at Sithanagaram police station in the early hours of the morning.
“We rushed to the spot, conducted a preliminary examination and took the bodies to the Government General Hospital in Rajamahndravaram for post-mortem examination,” the official said, adding that a case of murder has been registered and investigation is underway.
