Over the next three days, he disposed of the bags in different parts of the city. All this without taking a single day off work.
These and other grisly details have been revealed by the police as they began piecing together the sequence of events that led to the crime.

The first day, on March 26, Shailendra allegedly dressed up as a woman — wearing a maxi gown and covering his face with a dupatta – to hide his identity and disguise physical appearance to evade CCTV cameras, and rode Sachin’s two-wheeler to the Bholav GIDC area. Here, he dumped some of the body parts, including Sachin’s severed head, in the open drainage line. Shailendra then allegedly withdrew cash from an ATM using Sachin’s debit card and switched on the phone of the deceased to message the latter’s family members and mislead them, the police said. After that, he went to his office.

On March 28, when Sachin’s brother arrived in Bharuch, Shailendra allegedly joined him to “look for” his sibling and also accompanied the family to the police station in Bharuch town to lodge a missing persons complaint. Later, he allegedly returned to dispose of the remaining body parts and headed to work, the police said.

On March 29, Shailendra allegedly escaped from Bharuch, citing the death of a relative in his village. The Bharuch district Local Crime Branch team tracked Shailendra down and nabbed him from Jogipur in Uttar Pradesh’s Bijnor district on Wednesday evening.

According to the Bharuch C Division police, which are investigating Sachin’s murder, the two friends used to frequently argue about paying the installments of a loan of Rs 4 lakh that Sachin had borrowed from a private financial institution for Shailendra. On the night of March 24, when the two met at Shailendra’s apartment in Haridham society in Bharuch, they allegedly argued over the payments that Shailendra owed Sachin, the police said. But the trigger, the police said, were a few “objectionable” photos of Shailendra’s wife that were allegedly stored in Sachin’s mobile phone.

On Thursday, a Bharuch court remanded Shailendra to eight days in police custody after the police sought a 10-day remand, based on the ground that much of the evidence needed to be gathered along with investigating the motive for the crime.

10-year-old friendship gone sour

Bharuch C Division Police Inspector VR Bharwad told The Indian Express that until a couple of years ago, the two friends shared an apartment along with their families. It is during that time that Sachin allegedly recorded objectionable videos and photos of his wife, Shailendra told the police on Thursday.

Bharwad said, “He has claimed during the investigation that when they shared the apartment around 2023-24, Sachin recorded some objectionable videos and photos of Shailendra’s wife while she was using the bathroom… Shailendra had been asking Sachin to delete the videos, he has claimed. It is a matter of investigation as we are yet to recover the mobile phone of the victim. Shailendra has also claimed that he had not defaulted on the loan installments. We will be reconstructing the sequence of events during his remand period and also recover the weapon of murder, the saw used to hack the body as well as the mobile phones.”

Bharwad added that clothes of the victim and the accused from the time of the crime as well as cloth pieces used to clean the blood stains in the house were yet to be recovered.

Sachin and Shailendra were friends from college days and had moved to Bharuch about 10 years ago in search of better career opportunities. They often quarreled over the payment of installments of a loan that Shailendra had acquired through Sachin, police said. They had also been arguing about the photos of Shailendra’s wife on Sachin’s phone, police added. On the night of March 24, they argued about the two issues and went to sleep in the accused’s apartment. “The next day, on March 25, they engaged in a bitter spat that led Shailendra to grab the kitchen knife and stab Sachin multiple times,” a police release said.

‘Misleading’ texts sent from victim’s phone

According to the police, Shailendra also allegedly confessed to slitting Sachin’s throat while stabbing him. “He went about his days as usual until March 29…even messaging Sachin’s family to (lead them to) believe that the victim had left his house and wanted to break ties with his family for some reason…That was a ploy to mislead them and the police,” Bharwad, the police inspector, told The Indian Express.

According to Bharwad, among the text messages allegedly sent by Shailendra to the deceased man’s brother using the victim’s phone were those intended to mislead the family into believing that Sachin had committed a murder. “In the text messages posing as Sachin, Shailendra narrated parts of the sequence of the victim’s murder to make the family believe that it was Sachin who had murdered an unknown man. He also sent a text message saying, ‘I am with another woman and I need a divorce from my wife’. In a different message, he told Sachin’s family, ‘I owed money to the man (allegedly killed), and he spoke indecently about my wife, prompting me to kill him by smashing a glass bottle on his head’,” Bharwad said.

Sachin’s brother, however, was aware about the money issue and suspected foul play, Bharwad added.

Sachin’s head was found inside an open drain in Bholav GIDC on March 29. The following day, parts of his body from the waist to knee, as well as his right arm, were recovered. The accused allegedly cut off a part of the right arm where the victim had an English cursive tattoo of his name to prevent identification.

On Monday, the police recovered the left hand, and on Tuesday, his torso was recovered from a bag in a drainage line in another part of the town.