Office boy confesses to murdering Navi Mumbai builder
Office boy arrested for the murder of a builder in Navi Mumbai. The motive is still unclear, and the weapon used has not been recovered.
Navi Mumbai: A day after a 45-year-old Ulwe builder was found dead in his Seawoods office, the police arrested his office boy for murdering him on Friday night. The body of the builder, Manoj Singh, was discovered by his two female staffers on Saturday morning at sector 44 in Seawoods.
The accused, Raju alias Shamsuddin Azam Khan Abu Gurera, 22, was detained on Saturday night over suspicion. After he confessed that he had killed his boss, he was arrested and produced before the court on Sunday and remanded into police custody till January 18.
“We are still interrogating him and are yet to conclude the motive behind the crime. The weapon used in the murder is also yet to be recovered,” Pramod Toradmal, senior police inspector, NRI Coastal police station, said.
The accused had allegedly taken away the hard disk of the CCTV cameras, which the police are yet to recover. Once recovered, it will be one of the crucial pieces of evidence in the case. Gurera has been working for around six years with Singh and has been like a shadow with him, police said. When the body was found, it had two head wounds, and it was suspected to be a bullet shot. “The postmortem report clarified that there was no entry or exit injuries of the bullet, and neither was any bullet found. Also, the accused said that he used an iron rod to kill the accused,” a police source said.
Singh’s wife on Saturday morning, had raised her suspicion over a man who was to meet her husband in the office. She had told HT that she last spoken to her husband at 11.30 pm, when he asked her to have dinner without him as he is expecting someone and he might get late and sleepin his office.
In the year 2022, Singh was arrested by NRI Coastal police in a cheating case for cheating several people by promising flats in a project in Ulwe, following which he was in Taloja jail for a few months. Police suspect that the motive of the crime is related to Singh’s absence during those months while he was in jail. “We are working on the call data record of the accused, deceased, and a few more people to establish the motive, and we will get clarity in the coming days,” the police said. Singh, who faced many threats from his opponents in the construction business had a highly secured office, that had metal detectors and a digital door that could not be opened by anyone outside.