3 women, 3 hotel rooms, 3 murders, and 1 police warning about couples

The murder of three young women in separate incidents in hotel rooms over the past 10 days in Hyderabad has put the police on edge and the spotlight on small hotels renting out rooms for cheap. Police are now asking hotels and lodges to be alert, especially if a couple hires a room and one of them leaves and does not return.

A particular focus is on customers using fake IDs to book rooms. Police on Monday warned hotels that if they do not verify whether Aadhaar or other IDs are authentic, they will face legal action. The Telangana Hotels Association has also urged hotels to exercise caution and thoroughly verify documents.

On Friday, police broke open the door of a room in a small hotel in Miyapur and made a grisly discovery: the decomposing body of a 27-year-old medical student. According to the police, the woman became acquainted with a man named Ravi Kumar on social media, and they entered into a relationship.

Ravi borrowed heavily from her, including a gold chain, citing family emergencies but promising to return everything soon. When she pressed him, he asked her to come to Hyderabad, where he would return the jewellery. They checked into the hotel on September 30, and at some point Ravi left alone.

Police said that when the woman's father called her, her phone was switched off. When she did not return to the hostel on Saturday, her friends also alerted her father, who then lodged a police complaint. Cops traced her last mobile phone location to the hotel, where they discovered her decomposing body.

Police say she was smothered with a pillow and Ravi is absconding. On September 29, a 34-year-old bank customer care executive was found dead inside a hotel room in SR Nagar. The woman had checked into the hotel with her partner, A Srinivas, who used a fake identity card.

Both of them hail from Vikarabad but work and live in Hyderabad, police said. When Srinivas was leaving the hotel alone with his bag on Tuesday at 3:30 am, a staff member did ask him if the woman was also leaving, but he claimed that she would check out in the morning after having breakfast, the police said.

It was not until late afternoon that the staff called police, after she did not answer the door for several hours. Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCP) A Ramana Reddy said that the woman was hit on the head with a blunt instrument, probably a curtain rod, causing her death.

"They may have had a quarrel late in the night, and he allegedly attacked her while she was eating. There were multiple injuries on her body. A plate of unfinished meal was found beside her on the bed," an official said.

Police found that the accused does odd jobs in the Telugu film industry and is currently on the run. Teams have been sent to search in his native village. On September 22, a 29-year-old woman was taken to a hospital at Kothaguda by her male friend, with whom she was staying at a nearby hotel.

Police said that the woman, who hailed from Jharkhand, and her friend, S Ravi Teja, who hails from Anakapalli in Andhra Pradesh, were working in the hospitality sector and had checked in a day earlier.