Bengaluru: A software engineer has been arrested on murder charges after he allegedly used his vehicle to kill a bodybuilder following a drunken dispute over a cigarette lighter, police officials said Monday.

The victim, identified as 33-year-old Prashanth M, was killed Sunday evening in the Electronics City area after a local cricket tournament ended in a violent confrontation.

Investigators say the suspect, 37-year-old Roshan Hegde, was drinking beer with Prashanth on an open field behind a shopping mall when a trivial argument regarding a lighter escalated into a physical brawl. The men reportedly attacked one another with glass bottles, an altercation that left Hegde with a lacerated tongue.

Following the fight, Hegde attempted to flee the scene in his car. Police report that Prashanth pursued the vehicle on foot and managed to cling to the door as it sped down the Veerasandra-Kammasandra Road.

According to a senior police officer, Hegde deliberately accelerated the car and veered into a tree before crashing into a compound wall to dislodge and crush the victim. Though the incident was initially reported to emergency services as a routine traffic accident, authorities determined the act was intentional.

"However, during a preliminary investigation, it was revealed that the crash was intentional and amounted to murder," a senior police official said.

Detectives were able to reconstruct the sequence of events using the vehicle’s dash camera, which recorded the entire fatal encounter.

Hegde was taken into custody by Hebbagodi police. An investigation into the homicide is ongoing.

With inputs from PTI