The officials of crime branch unit 5 have arrested four persons from Bihar and Karnataka in connection to the abduction and murder of a 23-year-old man, Rajesh Mandal, who had been missing since a month. Police probe revealed that Mandal was killed because he was allegedly involved in an illicit affair with the main accused's wife.
According to police, Rajesh, who had been at his hometown in Madhubani, Bihar since April, had returned to Mumbai in the second week of May. While Rajesh had informed his father that he had reached Kalyan in Pawan Express on May 13, he never reached home at Oshiwara and had been missing since. After waiting for two days, a missing complaint was lodged at Oshiwara. Primary probe revealed that Rajesh's last known location through Call Data Records (CDR) was in Fort.
While a parallel probe was initiated by the crime branch officials, a detailed investigation revealed that Rajesh had a tiff with a man, identified as Surender Mandal, who suspected the former of having illicit relations with his wife in their hometown.
Probe stated that Surender was working at a construction site near Harnbi Building on DN Road in Fort, which raised a number of alarms and Surender was picked up for enquiries from Bihar, as he and his two associates-- Ramkumar and Shambhu Sadaye had fled to their hometown.
Role of a fourth person, the supervisor of the construction site-- Vijay Kumar Mistry, was observed in the probe and subsequently, a team was sent to Karnataka to nab him.
During the investigation, the four accused confessed to the police and said that Rajesh had an illicit affair with Surender's wife for a year and the latter had to face embarrassment, which is why he and his associates had hatched a plan to kill Rajesh.
On May 13, Surender lured Rajesh near CSMT station and took him to a construction site nearby, where the accused hit Rajesh with an iron rod, brutally strangled Rajesh and slit his throat with a sharp weapon, following which the accused threw his body off the second floor of the construction site.
Police said, after the murder, in a bid to conceal his body and destroy the evidence, the accused quadruple threw Rajesh's body in a water tank that was closed since a couple of years, tossed in 25 kilograms of salt and concealed the tank before fleeing to their hometowns. Based on this information, police opened the tank and recovered Rajesh's skeleton and sent it for an autopsy at state-run JJ Hospital.
Subsequently, the accused quadruple were arrested and booked under relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) for murder (section 302), abduction for murder (section 364), causing disappearance of evidence (section 201), criminal conspiracy (section 120B) and common intention (section 34). They were produced before a local magistrate court and remanded in police custody for further probe.
