Pune Crime Files: How 3 words written on a hoodie helped police crack 2-year-old girl’s brutal murder

In the initial phase of the investigation by the joint team of Unit 4 of the Crime Branch of Pune City and Khadki police station, the police could not identify the victim. Meanwhile, the autopsy and inquest pointed to “compression of the neck with blunt trauma to the head” as the preliminary cause of her death.

“It was a sensitive investigation as the victim was a minor and remained unidentified initially. We pooled all the possible resources for the probe. Multiple police teams started looking at various angles and available leads. One of the teams was tasked to scan footage from all the security cameras and CCTV cameras installed on the roads approaching the location where the body was found. One camera footage showed a man and a woman carrying the girl child on the road from the Khadki Railway Station to Khadki Bazar. In the footage of another security camera located in another direction, the two suspects were seen leaving the area without the girl. It was a crucial lead. We knew at that point that the man and woman who were seen in this footage were our suspects,” said an officer who was part of the probe.

“But the two remained unidentified. They were not residents of the area. What came as a breakthrough was when close examination of the CCTV footage showed that the hoodie that the male suspect was wearing had ‘Sangharsh Group, Khirpuri’ written on it in Marathi. Khirpuri is a village in Balapur taluka of Akola district. The officials from Akola police were contacted and a team was sent to find if any clues about the suspects could be obtained,” added the officer.

Working on the leads gathered in Akola, the police identified the suspect as Santosh Devman Jamnik, 26, and the woman as the 32-year-old mother of the deceased child and resident of the same area. The woman and Jamnik were reported missing from their house along with the girl child, according to the Akola police. The police probe revealed that the girl was the woman’s youngest of four children. The identity of the woman and her deceased child have been withheld by the police.

“The woman had four children and had been separated from her alcoholic husband. Jamnik, with whom she was in a relationship, had started working at a construction site in Pune. Months before the incident, the woman too moved to Pune along with the girl to live with Jamnik. She had left her three older children at her parents’ house. The probe revealed that the two thought of the girl child as an obstacle in taking their relationship further. The night before the girl was found dead, they had beaten her up and strangled her to death. They then left her body at the location in Khadki where it was found,” a Crime Branch officer added.

An officer from Khadki police station said both Jamnik and the woman remain in prison under judicial custody pending trial. The chargesheet against them has been filed in the court.