A harrowing murder mystery unraveled after a red suitcase sitting in the general compartment of the Tamil Nadu Express was seized by the Chennai police. Chilling murder plot, stretching from a rented house in Chennai’s outskirts to railway station in Agra, led to the discovery of the murder of a 38-year-old pregnant woman.
The bag on being opened revealed dismembered remains of tbe pregnant woman, allegedly murdered by her lover after she refused to terminate the pregnancy and repeatedly pressured him to marry her, said the police.
The victim, Hayatun Nisha, a native of Odisha, had been living in a rented house on Mosque Street in Guduvanchery where she was murdered earlier this month, the police added. It is suspected that the accused, after killing her, smashed her head to make identification difficult before packing her dismembered remains into the suitcase and sending it aboard the Tamil Nadu Express.
The bag was left unclaimed at a train from Chennai Central to New Delhi on August 3rd. Two days later, on August 5th, the railway police checked that unclaimed suitcase at Agra Cantonment railway station, bringing the gruesome murder to light. As the probe deepened, investigators collected and accessed the CCTV footage from Chennai Central and other stations along the route.
The footage showed a man and a woman carrying the suitcase. A lead that helped the police track the movements back to Guduvanchery. Piecing together the CCTV footage, mobile phone data and other technical evidence, Guduvanchery police tracked down the accused, Manik Uddin Laskar, 22, from Assam, and his wife Bhagabati Majhi from Odisha, all the way to Kashmir, in Manipur, in Manipur’s Jiribam district on Saturday.
The couple was arrested and brought to Guduvanchery for further investigation. The trail also led the investigators to the rented house where the victim had been staying, where more body parts were recovered later from a major cooking vessel, police said.
As the probe deepened, police began probing Nisha’s relationship with Manik and discovered she was pregnant. The arguments escalated, pushing Malik and his wife to a chilling decision of killing Nisha. After the murder, they allegedly dismembered her body parts, packed some of the remains into the suitcase and carried it to Chennai Central before placing it aboard Tamil Nadu Express.
During the interrogation, the couple allegedly revealed a particularly gruesome detail that her head was shaved after it was severed. They initially tried to fit it in the suitcase but could not, following which they smashed it into smaller pieces to pack.
Currently, the police are coordinating with Agra railway police to trace the remaining body parts and determine whether all the remains transported in the suitcase have been recovered or not.