Over the last two months, police in this Haryana district on the edge of NH1, just 20 km away from Delhi, have stumbled upon seven bodies, one bearing burn marks, another showing signs of injuries on the head, one badly mutilated, another cut to pieces. They haven’t yet been able to identify even one, and this is their chilling conclusion: Sonipat is emerging as a “dumping ground” of bodies from outside the state. The latest, unprecedented spurt started with the sensational discovery on April 6 of the naked bodies of a man and a woman found squeezed into two steel trunks in the parking lot of Tau Devi Lal stadium — the woman’s body had wedding bangles, the man had been cut up to fit in. [related-post] And then, this is what followed, according to police records: April 8: The body of a young man was found on the Delhi-Panipat highway with clear signs of injuries on the head. April 18: The body of a woman was recovered from the Haryana State Infrastructure and Industrial Development Corporation (HSIIDC) industrial estate in Kundli. April 25: The body of a man was found in Chinoli village. June 15: The charred bodies of two women were recovered from a burning pile of dried cow dung at Dehisara village. With no clues yet to their identities — police have taken DNA samples before cremating them — senior officers say Sonipat’s proximity to the national capital and Uttar Pradesh have made it vulnerable to what one of them described as the “this macabre dumping” of bodies. “Gurgaon and Faridabad also share borders with Delhi, but these are urban areas. This is not the case with Sonipat. We suspect that people are being murdered in Delhi or UP and their bodies dumped here,” said Shrikant Jadhav, IGP, Rohtak range, who oversees policing in Panipat, Sonipat, Rohtak and Jhajjar districts. “It’s not only in Sonipat, bodies are dumped in areas adjoining NH1 all the way to Panipat,” he added. In fact, two bodies were found in Panipat and two in Rohtak, both districts bordering Sonipat, in the last two months — in these cases though, the alleged killers were arrested. Jadhav added that police have now intensified night patrolling along the highway, dividing areas of Panipat and Sonipat adjoining NH-1 into six segments. According to police records, over 155 unidentified bodies of suspected murder victims have been found so far across all districts of Haryana this year. In 2014, at least 16 per cent of murder cases in the state remained unsolved. In Sonipat, meanwhile, the bodies of the two victims stuffed in trunks continue to dominate conversations. “We tried our best, but we have not been able to get any clue about the identity of the two. We took their fingerprints and even contacted the Unique Identification Authority of India (UID) headquarters in Delhi to seek their help. Nothing was achieved,” said a senior police officer. What’s baffling police is that despite the wide publicity that the discovery of these bodies generated, not one family member or friend has turned up. Haryana Police have also sent messages to their counterparts in the neighbouring states of Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Delhi, seeking help. “There has been no response,” the officer said.
