Local Crime Branch (LCB), Raigad has nabbed six persons working with a restaurant in Panvel for murdering their former colleague and then dumping the body in a sack besides Mumbai-Goa Highway. The body of an unidentified person was found in a sack on May 22 at Ambivali phata on Mumbai-Goa Highway roadside. The case of murder was registered with Pen police and the attempts were on by them to identify the deceased person. “When it comes to migrants who stay alone here without family, no missing case is immediately registered till the family realizes the missing and comes here to file one. Hence we decided to go behind the accused instead of trying to identify the deceased,” police inspector Balasaheb Khade from LCB said.
The body found was in a plastic sack that had a stamp on it. With the help of the stamp, the police found that the sack was purchased from ‘Big Saree Bazar’ in Panvel market. “We traced the place from where the sack was purchased and also got the cctv footage of the accused buying and leaving on his scooter. Though we had the face of the accused and the scooter, the registration number of the vehicle was not clear,” Khade added. Next, the police started working on dump data of the area wherein the body was found. The police suspected that the body was dumped on the night of May 19 and hence they started tracing the mobile number that was active on the night of May 19th in the area and zeroed on one number that had make a brief phone call from the spot. The person was identified as Anuj Bhalchandra More (27), a resident of Matunga. The police nabbed More and on interrogation, it was found that More worked in a restaurant named Punjabi Palete in Panvel.
More revealed that the deceased man was known as Abhishek and worked in the same restaurant previously. “The full name and other details of the deceased is not known yet and we are still in the process of tracing his family. The accused told that there was a female cleaner in the restaurant who was constantly harassed by the deceased. He used to make random videos of the female which irked her. Abhishek had left the job but on May 17 he had gone again to the restaurant to take his pending payment. After collecting the payment, he stole the mobile phone of the female employee before leaving the place,” Khade added. The female employee complained to the manager of the restaurant Manoj Gangurde. On the morning of May 19, Gangurde asked Abhishek to come to the restaurant after which he along with the other staff including the female, started questioning him over harassing her and stealing her mobile phone. They all ganged up against him and started assaulting him with kicks and punches which eventually lead to his death. Apart from Gangurde and the female employee, the others who assaulted him were Ganesh Narayan Deshmukh (26), Kanifnath Suresh Mhatre (28) and Sumit Keshav Chaire (27).
After realising that he was dead, they hid his body in big freezer of the restaurant and then at night packed the freezer with a cloth and hired a tempo to transfer the freezer to another dhaba near Mumbai-Goa road. “The dhaba on the highway belong the accused and was non functional. They told the tempo driver that they wanted to shift a freezer and hired his service. After the freezer was shifted, Gangurde called More and asked him to get rid of the body,” Khade added.
According to police, the restaurant where the murder happened was primarily frequented by people to consume alcohol hence at the time of the murder, there were no customers in the restaurant.
