Mumbai:
More than a week after the body of an unidentified woman was found in a gunny bag in a local at Churchgate station, a ghastly tale, involving not one but two murders, has come undone before of the cops.
The special squad formed by Police Commissioner Arup Patnaik, to probe the conundrum posed by the unidentified body, unravelled the case, when they found that the woman had been killed by her husband, who also murdered her seven-year-old sister for fear that she might be a witness to the crime.
The police zeroed in on him near the Indo-Bangladesh border, when he was trying to flee. The victims and the accused were illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, and had been living in Nallasopara for an undisclosed period of time.
The probe began when, on April 26, porters informed the Churchgate GRP of a woman's body they found in a gunny bag. Hidden under a seat, the bag was first spotted by a fisherwoman in an early morning local on platforms 3 and 4. She thought it was unclaimed baggage and informed the porters, who dragged it outside the train, thinking the owner would come back to claim it. After an hour, at 7.30 am, they opened the luggage to find the body of a strangulated woman, covered in 24 pieces of clothing.
The jigsaw fell into place when the police arrested Liton Khan, husband of Laizu, whose body was found in the train, from Kolkata yesterday. The special police squad, consisting of Sub-inspector Anand Bhoir and Inspector Rakesh Sharma were assigned the job to nail the accused.
According to the two officials, the accused has confessed to the double murders. He said that his wife, incidentally his second, harassed him to the point that he was driven to finish her off. He claimed that they had fights everyday and she beat him up regularly. The day he killed her -- on the night of April 25 -- they had bickered violently.
His wife had hit him with a wooden stick on his head. But he stayed calm, that is, until after she went to sleep along with her sister, Rubina. Then, he strangulated her. He realised that Rubina may inform their relatives, so he killed her as well. They were both asleep when he stifled them.
One of the cops said, "He then dumped Rubina's body somewhere in Nallasopara, and his wife's body in a train standing at Nallasopara station, after swaddling her in clothes and packing her in a gunny bag." After disposing off the bodies, he fled to Kolkata the next morning and reached there on April 28. He had almost escaped to Bangladesh when he was nabbed.
Police informers led the cops to the family's residence in Nallasopara, where they found that the family was of Bangladeshi origin. They spoke with the family's kin and neighbours only to find that the accused had left for Kolkata to flee across the border into alien territory. They took one of the relatives along to Kolkata to help identify him, and finally caught him. He will be flown to the city today morning. The police will then locate Rubina's body, which still hasn't been found.
Said Sharma, "We have arrested the accused and would get him on Thursday morning." The police, reportedly, had also called in for CCTV footage from all railway stations between Churchgate and Virar, and they found the grab of a man loading a gunny bag in the train at Nallasopara station.