ANANTAPUR: A B.Tech student, who went untraceable in Anantapur of Andhra Pradesh a few days ago, ended up as a victim to the Player’s Unknown Battle Ground (PUBG) online game, which was banned recently. Kurkuri Kiran Kumar Reddy committed suicide at his residence here, apparently upset by the Centre government banning the game and unable to come out of his addiction to the game.

Kiran Kumar Reddy was a final year B-Tech student at a college in Chennai. According to details, Reddy, who came back from Chennai since the time the COVID-19 lockdown was imposed, had lived with his maternal grandparents in Amadaguru in Anantapur district. But he was always seen busy playing the dangerous game on his mobile smartphone and kept himself aloof.

Seeing his addiction to PUBG, he was sent back to his parents house in Revenue Colony of Anantapur a few weeks ago. But ever since the Centre banned PUBG along with several Chinese apps, his condition turned for the worse. He had been feeling suffocated in the absence of the game and, according to his relatives, also often cribbed about the ban on it.

Against this backdrop, he suddenly disappeared from his house a few days back. Initially, his family members thought he would have been off to any of his friend’s place, which he frequently used to do since his return from his grandparents house. With him not returning even after a day, they began making frantic searches all over. But all their efforts went in vain as they could not get any clues on where he could be.

On Friday evening, he was found dead right inside their house. His paternal uncle, who decided to search every room of the house, found him hanging dead from the ceiling fan in a small storeroom on the first floor of the house.

It is learnt from his relatives that Kiran was so addicted to the game that he began borrowing huge sums of money from his mother and spent it for BitCoin to play the game. He was believed to have extracted a total of Rs 3.5 lakhs from his unsuspecting mother. Steeped so deep into the vice, he was also believed to have mortgaged his personal electronic gadgets including laptop.

The police have registered a case and are investigating it from all angles to ascertain the cause of the death.