Mumbai: Two face murder trial for six years, police yet to identify victim

From the spot, where the accused reportedly claimed to have disposed of the body of Karan Kakkad, the police recovered 18 bones, including a skull, which was not of Kakkad, but of another unknown victim.

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The police had claimed that a torso found at the spot matched with the DNA of Kakkad’s mother. (Representational)

In 2012, while investigating the murder of Arunkumar Tikku, father of a bit-part Bollywood actor, the Mumbai Police claimed that the arrested accused had also committed the murder of an aspiring movie producer, Karan Kakkad. The police also claimed that the accused had led them to Kashedi ghat in Chiplun in coastal Maharashtra, where Kakkad’s body was dumped to destroy evidence. The recovery made at the ghat, however, led to the registration of one more FIR against Vijay Palande and Jagdish Shejav alias Dhananjay Shinde, with the police claiming that they recovered 18 bones from there, including a skull, which was not of Kakkad, but of another unknown victim.

Six years later, while Palande and Shejav are facing trial for the alleged murder of the unknown victim, the police have not been able to make any headway into the person’s identity or other details about the offence. The police had claimed that a torso found at the spot matched with the DNA of Kakkad’s mother. However, the report of the chemical analyser at the Forensic Science Laboratory in Mumbai showed that another profile matches that of a human, but the identity is not known.

This year, the court framed charges against the two for murder, destruction of evidence and criminal conspiracy. Advocate Prashant Pandey, representing the accused, opposed the framing of charges and submitted to the court that a murder case cannot be made out without knowing the identity of the victim. “It was submitted that not only is the identity unknown, but the police also do not have details about where and when the alleged murder took place, how was the offence committed and what was the motive,” Pandey said.

The accused have also claimed before the court that the bones found at the spot do not match one single person and that one even belongs to a calf. Palande had also submitted that he had agreed to a narco-analysis test, in which he had shown no knowledge about this alleged offence.

“Though it is submitted that no dead body was recovered to show that accused committed murder and there is no evidence on how the murder was committed, but while going through the material on record, it appears that there is sufficient evidence to prima facie frame charge against the accused persons,” the court had said in February. Since then, the court has examined a witness, the investigating officer of the Tikku murder case, in whose probe the “third victim” was allegedly found.

According to the police, Palande and others, including Shinde, were booked for allegedly murdering Tikku with the intention to take over his property in Oshiwara, Andheri, where his son Anuj lived.

The accused had befriended Anuj and Palande allegedly had taken him out of the city on some pretext, when his co-accused committed Tikku’s murder. The probe revealed the alleged murder of Kakkad as well, who, the police claimed, was also killed by the accused for money. The accused are facing trials for these two murders as well. Palande is also facing life imprisonment for the murder of killing a father-son duo in 1998.

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Mumbai Police