A small UP town, a body in red suitcase, and a police force scrambling for clues

According to autorickshaw driver Mehraam Singh, who plies the area every morning, he and some other passersby saw the suitcase early Friday afternoon and alerted the police. “First, one policeman came, and then others followed and opened up the suitcase. I did not see the body at the time, but I saw pictures circulating on WhatsApp later. I have never heard of such a murder here,” he said.

The district saw a similar case exactly a year ago — the body of a woman was found in a suitcase near the Delhi-Agra National Highway 2.

On Saturday, while the country remained preoccupied with the alleged murder of 28-year-old Shraddha Walkar, the woman in the red suitcase was the centre of conversation in the small town of Raya in Uttar Pradesh. Labourers in the vicinity discussed how it was unlikely that the body belonged to a local. “She was not dressed like someone from the area… and we villagers usually don’t keep such suitcases,” said one.

Police at the station in Raya are inclined to agree. Gathered around a table on the chilly evening, they offered their opinions on the case. Said one personnel: “The body was not in a decomposed state. She must have been left there during the night.”

There are some clues as to what might have killed her, with police saying that she seemed to have a head injury, as well as what appeared to be a gunshot wound near her shoulder – but these will have to be confirmed by a doctor.

A day earlier, the area’s circle officer, Mahavan Alok Singh, had said: “It seems that she was murdered somewhere and her body was left here. There is a suspected gunshot wound near her shoulder; we will find out through a post-mortem whether it is indeed a gunshot.”

None of the missing persons complaints at the station match the profile of the dead woman. A dozen missing person notices with descriptions are pinned to a board here — some of them worn from time and exposure.

Getting useful CCTV footage will also be difficult, said investigators. While there are cameras on the expressway, they are some distance away. Police have also put out a call to the rest of Mathura’s stations regarding the incident, and are hopeful that social media attention and press coverage will help with the identification.

The Raya station is small, catering to a village of about 20,000 and the surrounding area, but this has not stopped them from deploying teams to check for missing persons cases in Hathras, Bulandshahr, Noida, Aligarh, and Agra at the District Crime Record Bureaus.

On Saturday morning, despite attention around this case, the station was back to its regular routine, taking complaints from local residents. But the suitcase in the evidence room and the body it held are never far from conversation.

The woman’s body is currently resting in a freezer at the Mathura district mortuary, a nondescript building with a garden at its front.

According to Dr Mathuresh Bihari, who is currently posted at the mortuary, unidentified bodies are not an uncommon sight. “From October to November, about 30 of the bodies that have come to the mortuary were of unidentified persons. They died of various causes, such as accidents, or falling off trains… Out of the nine bodies that are in freezers here right now, five are unidentified. Once we receive the panchnama from the police after 72 hours pass, we conduct the post-mortem.”

Families of deceased individuals wait near the gate, occasionally conversing with arriving police personnel. But for now, there is no one waiting here for the unknown woman.