Trainee air hostess found brutally killed in Andheri flat

A trainee flight attendant was found dead in her Mumbai apartment. The cleaning staff member of the housing society has confessed to the murder.

Cleaning staffer confesses to crime; says she had offended him in a previous argument

Mumbai, India - Sep 04, 2023 : The Powai police on Monday morning arrested a cleaning staff of a housing society in Marol for allegedly murdering a trainee air hostess living in the building, in Mumbai, India, Monday, Sep 04, 2023. (Photo by Vijay Bate/HT Photo)

MUMBAI: A 24-year-old trainee flight attendant was found dead in her apartment in Andheri East on Monday morning, following which Powai police arrested a member of the cleaning staff of the housing society in a case of alleged murder.

The victim had moved to the city six months ago from Raipur, Chhattisgarh, and lived in the third floor rented accommodation in N G Complex, with her elder sister and a friend. However, at the time of the incident, she was alone in the apartment. Three days ago, her sister and friend had left for their hometown.

The victim last spoke to her family on Sunday morning, but in the course of the day when they tried to get in touch with her, their calls went unanswered. They then reached out to her friends in the city, asking them to check on her. “When they arrived at her house around 9.30pm, they found the door closed from inside. There was no response to repeated knocking and the doorbell, whereupon they sought the help of a security guard to break open the door,” said an officer from Powai police.

When they saw the body of the victim lying in a pool of blood in the bathroom, they reported the matter to the local police.

Eight teams were formed immediately after registering the murder. “We made a list of 35 suspects initially based on the probable time of death, after accessing all the entries in the visitors register. The suspects were questioned throughout the night. After a thorough technical investigation and several interviews, we narrowed down the list of suspects until we reached the accused -- 40-year-old Vikram Atwal,” said, deputy commissioner of police, Datta Nalawade.

The wife of the accused also works in the housekeeping department of the building. The couple has two daughters, one of them a teen. When the investigating team arrived at Atwal’s residence in Tunga village, Andheri, 14 hours after the FIR (section 302 of IPC, for murder) was registered, they found him in a blood-soaked shirt, with visible injury marks over his hands and face, indicating a prior scuffle between him and the deceased. The questioning revealed that Atwal was offended by the way the deceased spoke to him during a previous argument.

Upon arrest, the accused told the police he decided to go to her house with a knife at a time he knew she was alone. “He told us that in the course of the struggle, the deceased had managed to overpower him physically and at one point even took away the knife. Scared that her complaint might put him out of work, he acted swiftly, wrested the knife back from her and slit her throat,” said an officer.

After ensuring that she was dead, he shifted the body to the bathroom as he did not want the blood to flow out from under the main door of the flat. He thought that the body would not be discovered for a couple of days at least or until the victim’s sister returned home. “This, he thought, would give him sufficient time to run away and escape arrest,” said an officer. Police are not ruling out the possibility of a sexual assault. Her viscera have been sent to the state Forensic Science Laboratory in Kalina and results are expected in a couple of weeks.

The body was sent to Rajawadi Hospital for postmortem on Monday morning and the results are awaited. It was later handed over to the family who arranged for it to be flown to the victim’s hometown for last rites. The probe to find the motive of the murder is still underway.