Police tracked the accused after he used Monika Ghurde's ATM card in Maharastra and Karnataka.
Highlights
- ATM transactions from her stolen debit card led the police to the accused
- Police claim Rajkumar Singh has confessed to killing Monika Ghurde
- Ms Ghurde's post-mortem report revealed that she was suffocated to death
Four days after perfumer Monica Ghurde was found murdered in her flat near Panaji, Goa Police arrested the suspect, a former security guard, from a hotel in Bengaluru.
Accused Rajkumar Singh, a former security guard at the apartment complex where Ms Ghurde stayed earlier, had stolen Ms Ghurde's two ATM cards besides her mobile phone after allegedly killing her. It is through the transactions that he made using her cards in Mangalore and Bengaluru that helped police track him, a senior officer said.
MS Ghurde was found strangled, body tied to a bed, in her three-bedroom rented apartment in Sangolda village, near Goa.
"Rajkumar was identified from the records of police verification at the local police station which maintains details of all helps working in the apartment," said Vimal Gupta, an officer leading the investigation.
The team matched Rajkumar's photos in police records with the ones obtained from ATMs CCTV footage in Goa, Mangalore and Bengaluru.
The police say Rajkumar has confessed to killing Ms Ghurde, but the motive behind the murder was still not clear. Rajkumar will be brought to Goa after a local judge gives the Goa police his custody.
Her post-mortem report had revealed that she was suffocated to death. The police is also waiting for the results of "serological examinations of oral, vaginal and inner swabs" to confirm rape.
Ms Ghurde married and moved to Goa in 2011. She had been living separately from her photographer husband since the last one year.