Click here to join Express Pune WhatsApp channel and get a curated list of our stories
© The Indian Express Pvt Ltd
Tags:
Journalism of Courage
The Pune rural police, which found a 22-year-old IT engineer, who went missing from Pune and was found murdered on a ghat section of the Pune-Nashik highway, have formed four teams to probe the case and reconstruct the sequence of events.
Saurabh Nandlal Patil hailed from the temple town of Shirdi in Ahmednagar district. He completed his engineering degree and appeared for the final exam of MTech from an engineering college in Pimpri Chinchwad. Patil’s father is a teacher and his mother a homemaker.
Police said from June 6, Saurabh started working for a private structural designing firm in Hinjewadi.
He had however decided to leave the company in the last week of July as the company’s work and his interests were not matching, said police adding that they were probing his exact employment status with the company and the terms and conditions under which he decided to leave.
According to police, on July 28, Patil told his family that he was coming home. As he did not reach home long beyond the expected time of arrival and his phone was also not reachable, his family members got worried.
Police said the family initially contacted his friends, some of whom had been living with him in a shared accomodation in Pimpri Chinchwad. After he could not be found and contacted, his cousin Sandeep Sonavane lodged a missing complaint at Hinjewadi police station on July 29 in consultation with the family.
In the initial stage of investigation, police found his bike on the Pune-Nashik highway on July 29 but there was no breakthrough in finding Patil.
On August 5, locals from Sandbhorwadi area on the Pune-Nashik road in Khed taluka found a decomposing body and reported it to the police. Subsequent probe confirmed it was Patil’s.
In-charge of Khed police station inspector Rajkumar Kendre, who is probing the case, said, “The autopsy revealed two stab injuries in the chest and stomach. We have launched a probe. Four teams — three from Khed police station and one from the local crime branch of the Pune Rural police–have started working on various clues in the case.”
Officials said Patil’s phone is also being searched and his call history and call data records will also be scanned.
Sources said on Monday and Tuesday, officials from Khed and Hinjewadi police stations visited the company in Hinjewadi where Patil worked and his accomodation to reconstruct the sequence of events before he went missing.
