delhi

Updated: May 04, 2019 09:17 IST

It was a two-minute conversation that 27-year-old doctor Chandra Prakash Verma had with his mother over the phone Thursday morning that led police to him.

Police tracked down Verma’s last phone call location to Uttarakhand’s Rishikesh, but it took them more than 24 hours to identify the guest house where he was staying. They finally nabbed him from Roorkee when he was about to jump into the Ganga canal.

Verma’s phone was switched off near NH-24 around 10pm Tuesday, almost two hours after he allegedly murdered his flatmate, Dr Garmia Mishra, a crime branch officer said.

“As Verma did not turn up at his family home in Bahraich nor at his relatives’ or friends’ houses, we were waiting for him to switch his phone on or try to contact someone from a landline. The phone numbers of his family, relatives and friends were on surveillance,” the officer said.

On Thursday, around 7am, Verma called his mother and said he had committed a “big mistake” and sought her forgiveness. He told her that he was going to kill himself and disconnected the call, the police said.

“The call location was traced to Rishikesh. The police teams visited over 30 guest houses in Rishikesh found the one where he had stayed till 6am Thursday,” the crime branch officer said.

Police said the guest house staff told them that Verma had been enquiring about the depth of the Ganga, the points where the river was very deep, and the chances of survival if he jumped into the river. The staff told him that the Ganga canal is much deeper at places in Dehradun and Haridwar. “Our team began scanning areas along the river and the Ganga canal. They spotted him standing on a bridge in Roorkee and caught him. He confessed to killing his roommate and also admitted that he was about to kill himself,” DCP (crime branch) G Ram Gopal Naik.

During questioning, Verma revealed that he tried to kill himself thrice but could not do so.

“Verma said on Wednesday, at the guest house in Rishikesh, he planned to hang himself from the ceiling fan but dropped the idea as he thought that the fan would break,” the officer said.

The second time, he tried to get himself electrocuted by touching a power transformer in Haridwar. But since Verma had dealt with cases of attempted suicides gone wrong at the hospital, he knew the problems the families of such people faced and decided to drop the second plan, the officer said.

“He then decided to jump into the Ganga canal and reached the Roorkee bridge. But we caught him before he could jump,” the officer added.