A 65-year-old man in Mumbai allegedly killed his 63-year-old wife over personal issues and then hid her body inside their iron bed and escaped earlier this week. The Goregaon police have launched a hunt for the accused husband. The victim has been identified as Ragini Sonu Savardekar. She lived in a chawl in Motilal Nagar-1 with her husband, Pratap Baskoti. According to the First Information Report (FIR), Savardekar’s neighbour contacted her nephew Nitin Ambekar’s family on Wednesday and informed them that Baskoti gave their room key to them on Monday, saying he and his wife were going to South Mumbai. But none of them returned since then. The neighbour also informed Ambekar’s family that a foul smell was coming from the locked room. Thereafter, the police were called, but they initially found nothing in the room. The police then opened the iron bed and found the semi-decomposed body of a woman inside. Ambekar identified the body as that of his aunt, states the FIR. The body was sent for post-mortem, and preliminary examination indicates that the elderly woman was strangled to death. Speaking to The Indian Express, Ambekar, who is in the real estate business, and also the complainant in the case, said his aunt looked after her mother and so she could not marry early. Around 14 years ago, she had a love marriage with Baskoti, who already had two kids from an earlier marriage. His first family was living in Uttar Pradesh. Baskoti had no fixed job, and Savardekar used to get rent from her other rooms in the chawl. Savardekar and Baskoti were living in the Goregaon room alone after the former’s mother expired a few years ago. “There used to be fights between the couple, but we never thought that something of this sort would happen. We don’t exactly know what the motive was behind the crime, but a few months ago, my aunt had reported the theft of around Rs 4-5 lakh at her place. It’s suspected that Baskoti could be behind it, as the police did not find any signs of an outsider entering the house. Maybe my aunt discovered Baskoti’s (alleged) involvement in the theft, and this led to a fight in which he strangled her to death,” Ambekar said. The Goregaon Police, which registered a murder case against Baskoti on Thursday, have found the last location of his and Savardekar’s mobile phones to be a nearby nullah, and they suspect the accused dumped them there after the crime.
