Beed: A 15-year friendship came to a gruesome end following an alcohol-fuelled brawl when a 23-year-old youth from Shikrapur in Pune district was allegedly strangled with a seatbelt inside a moving car by two close friends. The accused later dumped his body into a gorge in the Kanifnath Ghat in Ashti tehsil on the Beed-Ahilyanagar state highway to destroy evidence, police said.
The Ambhora police cracked the murder within six hours of registering the FIR and arrested both accused after tracking them down to a remote farm in Beed district.
The victim was identified as Abhishek Namdev Karakambe (23), a native of Tamsa in Nanded district, who was residing in the Phaltan Phata area of Shikrapur. The arrested accused have been identified as Bhagwat Jalindar Aare (28), a resident of Shahjanpur Loni in Beed district, and Sandeep Lallu Sonkhar (21), a resident of Shikrapur.
According to investigators, the accused picked up Karakambe in a car on the pretext of a leisure drive on September 25. All three consumed alcohol during the journey. Between 3am and 6am, a petty dispute broke out among them, escalating rapidly into physical violence. In a fit of drunken rage, the two accused overpowered Karakambe and strangled him using the car’s seat belt.
Realising he was dead, the duo drove towards Ashti tehsil and hurled the corpse into the dense foliage of Kanifnath Ghat before fleeing the area.
Local passersby spotted the body around noon on Friday, prompting the Ambhora police to rush to the spot. To establish the victim's identity, investigators circulated photographs and alerts across police stations in Maharashtra and on social media platforms. The victim’s father, Namdev Karakambe, came across the social media alert and rushed to Beed, where he identified the body at the district civil hospital morgue.
Following an official complaint by the father, Ambhora police deployed technical intelligence and tracked the suspects to a farm in Devdi Shivar in Wadwani tehsil. A police team laid a trap and apprehended both men within six hours of the case being registered.
During questioning, the duo confessed to killing Karakambe over a trivial issue under the heavy influence of alcohol. On Sunday, the accused were produced before the Ashti magistrate's court, which remanded them in police custody for six days.
Beed Superintendent of Police Navneet Kanwat, Additional SP Sameer Shaikh, and Sub-Divisional Police Officer (Ashti) Vishwajeet Khule commended the investigation team led by Assistant Police Inspector Vikrant Hinge, Police Sub-Inspector Adinath Bhadke, Local Crime Branch PSI Shekhar Aute, and constables Haribhau Bangar, Rajkumar Munde, Yuvraj Shridole, and Shivdas Kedar for identifying the deceased within 10 hours and nabbing the suspects shortly thereafter.
