A court in Tumkur on Tuesday awarded death sentence to Mallika, the notorious serial killer of Bangalore who earned the sobriquet ‘Cyanide Mallika’ for killing eight women in and around the city between 1999 and 2007.
The court examined 33 witnesses before announcing the verdict in one of the cases, making Mallika the first woman to be given death penalty in Karnataka. Forty-three-year-old Mallika lured six women from temples around Bangalore and poisoned them them with cyanide before robbing them of their ornaments, mobile phones and other belongings.
Mallika, according to the police, would hang around big temples and approach women who looked disturbed. She would then convince them that she had divine powers and promise to use them to solve their problems.
She then would take them to temples on the outskirts of the city and serve them food laced with cyanide and rob them. Police traced Mallika through the phone records of
one of her victims and arrested her in 2007.
