Within 24 hours of finding a woman’s severed head at a garbage dump in south Kolkata’s Tollygunge area, her brother-in-law was arrested for allegedly killing her, PTI reported citing police on Saturday.
The brother-in-law, identified as Atiur Rahman Laskar, had allegedly decided to kill her as she rejected his advances. Kolkata Police arrested him from his native village Basuldanga in South 24 Parganas’ Diamond Harbour.
Laskar, a construction worker, reportedly confessed to murdering the woman who had been separated from her husband for two years now, police said.
DCP (South Suburban) Bidisha Kalita said during a press conference that the woman’s severed head was found in a garbage dump near Graham Road on Friday, and the torso and lower portion of her body were found near a pond in the Regent Park area on Saturday.
The victim used to work as a domestic help in the Regent Park and used to travel to work every day with Laskar, who also was working in Tollygunge, she added.
The brother-in-law wanted to be in a relationship with her however, she rejected his advances. This snub infuriated Laskar, the DCP said.
A week ago, the victim, aged around 35-40 years, began avoiding the brother-in-law which further angered him. She even blocked his phone number.
“On Thursday evening, after she was done with work, he forced her to accompany him to an under-construction building. He strangulated her there and then beheaded her. He cut the body in three parts and dumped those,” Kalita said.
Police are also investigating the possible involvement of other people in this regard.
The recovery of the severed head in that locality sent chills down the residents’ spines, triggering a fear inside them.
How did cops find the severed head?
On Friday morning, locals had spotted a plastic bag containing the severed head in a vat on Graham Road under the Golf Green police station.
Soon after finding the body part, police had sent it to the MR Bangur Hospital for further examination, PTI reported.
Investigators from the homicide section of Kolkata Police’s Lalbazar headquarters examined all the available CCTV camera footage from the locality to identify who dumped the severed head there.
Police said that relevant samples were recovered from the spot.
The severed head also bore injury marks and blood stains, which suggested that the murder took place within 12 hours of its recovery, a police official said.
Later, investigators also deployed a sniffer dog to track down the source of the body part, which led them to a residential apartment around a kilometer away from the Graham Road vat.
However, the investigation could not proceed further from that spot at the time. Two constables had been posted at the entry gate of the apartment to track movements of those moving in and out of the building.
(with PTI inputs)
