Visuals from the brutal attack on Jyothi Uday caught on CCTV camera inside the ATM.Tirupati: More than three years after the sensational attack on a 38-year-old Keralite woman in an ATM kiosk in Bengaluru, the assailant was nabbed Saturday in his native Chitoor district in Andhra Pradesh during a routine police operation to trace absconding criminals.
History-sheeter Madhukar Reddy, 43, who escaped from a hospital in Kadapa in 2011 while serving a life sentence for a murder and allegedly committed the ATM crime two years later, was arrested in Nimmanapalli near Madanapalli, about 120 km from here, a top district police official said.
Reddy was spotted by a special police team tracking criminals who went underground, superintendent of police Ghattamaneni Srinivas told reporters in Chittoor, around 70 kms from Tirupati.
During interrogation, Reddy confessed to the brutal assault on the woman bank official inside the ATM kiosk on November 19, 2013 when she was repeatedly attacked with a machete, with the chilling crime caught on CCTV, the SP said.
The accused allegedly told the police that he had also murdered two women in Andhra Pradesh and a sex worker in Hyderabad.
The ATM incident had triggered widespread outrage as Jyothi Uday, the victim, was left paralyzed on her right side following the gruesome attack, which brought to fore safety issues with the government directing banks to shut down unguarded booths.
In the early morning attack, Jyothi, a Corporation Bank employee, was initially threatened by the assailant not to raise an alarm. He had later shoved her down and hit her repeatedly with a machete as she resisted. She was hospitalized for three months.
After the gory attack, the video footage had showed the attacker cleaning the machete of blood with the woman's napkin, taking away her phone and leaving the kiosk after pulling down the rolling shutter.
After committing the ATM attack, Reddy had worked as a painter at some places in Kerala and in Guntur in Andhra Pradesh, the SP said.
Suffering from some blood-related ailment, he had been in Chittoor district for the past few weeks for treatment, Srinivas said.
Karnataka police had launched a manhunt for the assailant but without any success in the past three years.
