One person has been arrested and the other is on the run.
Overcome by greed at the prospect of getting two phones worth Rs 90,000 for free, two men strangled a delivery agent with a charger cord and stuffed his body into his own bag before dumping it in a canal in Lucknow, police said.
Officials said a complaint that Bharat Kumar, a Flipkart delivery agent, had gone missing had been registered at the Chinhat police station in Lucknow on September 26 and a long investigation, involving the questioning of multiple people, has led to the first arrest in the case on Tuesday.
Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCP, East) Shashank Singh said, "Our initial investigation threw up several suspicious things and we got details of Kumar's deliveries for the day from Flipkart, including the undelivered orders. We questioned several people based on this information and then got to one Akash Sharma, who has confessed to killing Kumar along with his associate Gajanan."
The officer said Sharma had used the phone of one of his friends to order two cellphones - a Vivo V40 Pro and a Google Pixel 7 pro - which cost Rs 90,000 via Flipkart using the cash-on-delivery option.
"When Kumar reached the house for delivery, Sharma and Gajanan got greedy and thought of getting the phones and the other items that he was supposed to deliver to other people without paying any money. They asked Kumar to come in and then strangled him with the cord of a laptop charger lying nearby. They stuffed his body into his own Flipkart bag and then dumped it in the Indira Nagar canal," Mr Singh said.
The DCP said Sharma was arrested on Tuesday after he confessed and both phones and some other items that were meant to be delivered have been recovered from him.
"The police, teams from the national and state disaster response forces and local divers are trying to locate the body. Gajanan is on the run and he will also be arrested soon," he added.
A report by news agency ANI said Kumar was married and had been working for Flipkart for 8 years.