‘Would I have died a murderer?’ Mumbai man wrongly held for Glasgow killing

Now, more than two years later, his wife Sapna, a sales manager at a technology firm in Mumbai’s Malad, is preparing to take legal action against the authorities in Scotland and India for Sougat’s “wrongful identification, unlawful arrest, and systematic destruction”. “I really didn’t want to,” she says. “But the repercussions of the case, the financial and mental toll on my family and children, have been so huge.”

A murder in Glasgow

On November 24, 1997, Tracey Wylde, 21, was found dead in her flat in Barmulloch, north-east Glasgow. A post-mortem examination later confirmed the police’s findings of ‘manual strangulation’. Wylde was the sixth sex worker to be murdered in Glasgow between 1991 and 1999. The cases had proved notoriously difficult to prosecute, and the Scottish police admitted they could find no evidence linking them, leaving investigators to pursue separate suspects in each.

Sougat was then in Glasgow on a student visa. The second of two children of Syamal Chandra Mukherjee, a former director of logistics at ONGC, and Soma Mukherjee, Sougat was pursuing a two-year nautical course at the Glasgow College of Nautical Studies that would have led him to his dream job in the Merchant Navy. He stayed in a flat in Partick, in Glasgow’s West End, and worked part-time in grocery stores and restaurants.

Sougat and Sapna in happier times.

But things soon turned sour. His family says he was mugged near his college and had approached police, but they detained him instead for a day. The incident left him “unsettled” and, in February 1998, he returned to India. “He got scared. He was only 19,” says Sapna.

Sougat and his parents, Syamal Chandra Mukherjee and Soma Mukherjee.

Years later, Sougat’s decision to leave — at a time when the Scottish police were looking for suspects in the Wylde case — would be treated with suspicion.

Back in India, Sougat met Sapna at a festival in Mumbai’s Lala Lajpat Rai College. He was stepping in for his elder brother Sourav, who then worked for a security firm, by handling a sniffer dog at the college festival.

Sapna, a Class 12 student at the pre-degree college, says she didn’t approach Sougat first, but the dog. “Was the dog friendly?” she asked him. It was their first conversation.

They exchanged pager numbers and later, long phone calls. He told her about the course he had dropped out of and the humiliation of it. Sapna says she listened without judgment and soon, Sougat had left behind the memories of his brief stint in Glasgow.

They married the next year, in 1999. The couple later moved to Singapore, where Sapna completed a nurse practitioner course while Sougat secured a degree in mechanical engineering. The couple returned to India in 2005. Sapna changed careers to join a multinational firm and eventually moved to sales. By 2004, their three children were born.

Back in Scotland, something had stirred in the Tracey Wylde case. In 2013, Police Scotland’s Cold Case Review Team (CCRT), which works on unsolved homicides, began a fresh review of Wylde’s murder.

The prosecution’s case rested on a single DNA profile recovered from five locations on Tracey Wylde’s body.

Grainy CCTV frames had captured the young woman in the company of a man in his “mid-thirties or early forties”, approaching her apartment entrance at 2 am.

And then in a turn of events that his lawyers find “baffling”, the suspicion fell on Sougat. “The Glasgow police had drawn the sketch of the suspect. He had protruding teeth. It was only on the basis of this that Sougat was taken,” said Hitesh Jain, Senior Advocate, who handled Sougat’s case in 2019.

Sougat and Sapna got married in 1999.

Things moved rapidly. In August 2014, Police Scotland sought an Interpol Red Notice, branding Sougat a fugitive. In December 2014, the Crown Office, Scotland’s public prosecution service, claimed it had “sufficiency of corroborated, reliable and credible evidence”, following which Glasgow’s Extradition Section moved to arrest Sougat.

On January 9, 2015, the case reached the couple’s home in Malad, Mumbai. It was a knock in the morning, before the children could leave for school. Sougat, then a business development professional, was recovering from a leg injury at home. A team of Mumbai Police personnel, led by a woman officer, says Sapna, had come with a copy of the Interpol notice.

Their questions were blunt and, to the family, bewildering. “Aapne Glasgow mein kya kiya (What did you do in Glasgow)?” Sapna says Sougat kept repeating, “I have done nothing.” The only brush with the authorities he could remember from Glasgow was a warning over urinating in public, he told them.

At first, the family did not understand the scale of the allegation, says Sapna. Only after frantic calls did they learn that Sougat had been linked to a murder in Glasgow.

On January 9, 2015, he was arrested by the Detection Crime Branch (DCB), CID Extradition Cell, Mumbai, following instructions routed through the British High Commission, the extradition section at Patiala House in Delhi and the Ministry of External Affairs. He spent more than three weeks in prison at Mumbai’s Arthur Road Jail. “For days, we were totally unaware. Then, it was all over the papers, everybody started talking,” says Sapna.

The warrant for Sougat’s provisional arrest, secured by the Crown Office in December 2014, accused him of four counts of public indecency of sexual nature, besides the murder charge. Hitesh Jain, his lawyer then, says these were later proven to be false during the bail appeal proceedings in 2015.

“In spite of the fact that no extradition request had been received, the police placed him under arrest merely on the basis of a Red Corner Notice issued on suspicion. We argued before the Mumbai Metropolitan Court that there was no need for arrest and the court saw merit in our point and he was granted bail without having to approach the higher courts,” Jain told The Indian Express.

Glasgow’s request for Sougat’s extradition.

A senior officer said the Mumbai Police follows “diplomatic processes between countries and due processes in all cases”.

Sougat would later, in conversations with his family and interviews to the media, describe the jail stay as degrading and terrifying. “Police suspected me because I left in the middle of my studies. There was no other reason.”

In a 2019 interview to The Scottish Sun, a Glasgow publication, Sougat said, “I might have failed my course, but it doesn’t make me a killer. I was declared a rapist and a killer. I was treated like a monster. I was in prison for 24 days alongside dangerous criminals. The pavement in Glasgow was 100 times cleaner than the floor I was sleeping on. I was in jail for nothing. I’ve never even killed a cockroach.”

His bail plea was declined at the first three hearings. “Every morning at 5 am, we would leave for Arthur prison. They (jail staffers) allowed visitors between 11 am and 5 pm, and there would be a long queue… So, my mother-in-law and I would be there early in the morning and sit on the road outside the jail.”

Sougat was eventually granted bail on January 30, 2015, but he was required to report every Monday to the office of the inspector, Extradition Cell, DCB-CID, Mumbai — a routine he stuck to until July 13, 2015, after which he was required to visit once in two weeks.

Despite Sougat’s bail in 2015, suspicion followed him wherever he went. Sapna says their extended relatives grew quiet and invitations to family functions came with a whispered condition: “Please Sapna, don’t bring your husband. You and your children can come.”

She says with the family spending Rs 14.5 crore to fight the case, they had to sell their homes in Mumbai’s Kandivali and Nerul. Later, the landlord at their rented home asked them to vacate at a week’s notice, forcing Sougat, Sapna and the children to move to his family home in Kolkata.

Glasgow’s charges against 19-year-old Sougat.

It was also a period when Sougat, driven by guilt and shame at the suffering he had caused his family, distanced himself from Sapna and the children — sleeping in the living room, losing his temper and plunging into depression. He also suffered epileptic attacks, bruising his tongue badly each time. Sapna says that from someone who liked an occasional drink, Sougat quickly took to drinking heavily and ended up with acute liver cirrhosis. Repeated hospital visits followed as Sapna watched him sinking.

Sougat had lost his reputation, health and the will to return to himself. Yet, through his ill-health and family troubles, he kept trying to find work. Employers rejected him because of the gap in his resume. “Nobody came back to say, ‘Let us give you a job, no matter how small’,” Sapna says. “It would have saved him his life… The kids would have had their father.”

Sougat also meticulously kept track of the case in Glasgow through news alerts and notifications.

It was one such Google News notification that changed the course of his life — on 24 April 2019, China-born, first-generation immigrant Zhi Min Chen had pleaded guilty to killing Tracey Wylde in Glasgow in 1997.

The Glasgow High Court judgment on Chen’s sentence after he pled guilty.

In May 2019, the High Court in Glasgow sentenced Zhi Min Chen to life imprisonment, with a minimum term of 20 years, after he pleaded guilty to Wylde’s murder.

On February 8, 2019, Sougat wrote to then External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj to have the proceedings against him closed and to get his seized passport back. Until then, Sapna notes, they hadn’t heard from the British High Commission or the Mumbai Police about the developments in Glasgow.

Sougat wrote, “I have been giving attendance for more than four years… although since early 2018, I was not been keeping well… I am not able to join any company due to the verifications carried out by all companies, this has affected my health and mental well-being. My family is going through a major financial crisis… now we are not able to lead a normal family life.”

Sougat writing a letter requesting his passport to be returned.

On May 1, 2019, the MEA wrote to Sougat that British authorities had informed India that he was “no longer required by them” and that Indian authorities were being separately asked to terminate all proceedings. In a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2025, Sapna wrote that Sougat was officially exonerated by the MEA on May 1, 2019, but the damage to the family was irreversible.

‘The life of the family’

A photograph on her phone that Sapna keeps returning to has Sougat in a light pink shirt, his hands on his waist, his hair neatly combed. He looks into the lens, his smile wide.

The MEA’s letter to Sougat, informing that he is no longer required by the British authorities

The date on the photograph is April 9, 2020, almost a year after Zhi Min Chen had pleaded guilty to killing Tracey Wylde. The photograph, and the smile, are what she holds on to as the moment of his restoration — from murder suspect to the Sougat she knew, the one she remembers as a “one-person entertainment”.

“He was the life of the family,” she says. “The entire place would transform and light up in his presence. The brothers were opposites. Sourav was quieter, more reserved. Sougat was the one with so many tricks up his sleeve. He would crack jokes with uncles and aunties, he was the one people gathered around.”

Sougat and his brother Sourav at Sougat’s wedding.

Sapna’s life is now organised around her work, her children, and the wreckage the case has left behind. Her eldest daughter studies BSc Microbiology in Mumbai, her son has finished school and is hoping to secure admission in an engineering college and her youngest daughter is still in school. “My son’s admission is completely dependent on the finances. It has left me anxious,” says Sapna.

Sapna says her father-in-law’s health has suffered and they may now have to sell the Kolkata house he built to support themselves.  “I have seen the house being built from one floor to what it is now,” she says. “It is heartbreaking.”

The case, as it unfolded.

For Sougat’s brother Sourav, the loss has taken a different form. In 2025, after Sougat’s death, he wrote a book titled, I Want to Break Free: A Fictionalized Memoir of a Life Gone Too Soon, to keep memories of his brother alive.

As Sourav returns repeatedly to the “boy who lit up family gatherings”, there’s a recurring childhood memory. Two brothers on a terrace in Gujarat, with a kite straining against the wind, the elder trying to control the spool, the younger cutting the string and watching it disappear with a “signature smile”. “It looked better when it was free, dada,” Sourav recalls Sougat as saying.

Sougat and his brother Sourav.

The brother often returns to Sougat’s smile — “a grin”, he says that made him look both innocent and guilty at the same time. With time, Sougat learnt to hide it. Eventually, it disappeared altogether.

There is another memory, one that sears through the family every time they recall it — of Sougat asking his father: “Baba, if they hadn’t found him (Zhi Min Chen), would I have died a murderer?”

With inputs from Mohamed Thaver, Mumbai

(Visual design by Navya Roshan, an intern at indianexpress.com.)