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Saree found near crime scene helps Mira-Bhayander-Vasai-Virar cops crack murder case
The accused, Roopa Shaikh, was arrested on Saturday and remanded in police custody on Sunday for four days
Mumbai: A saree found near the crime scene helped the Mira-Bhayander-Vasai-Virar (MBVV) police arrest a transgender who allegedly murdered a 32-year-old supervisor of a furniture manufacturing company on Friday. The accused, Roopa Shaikh, was arrested on Saturday and remanded in police custody on Sunday for four days.
According to the MBVV crime branch, when an auto rickshaw driver went to relieve himself on Friday in the forest near Sativali village along Mumbai-Ahmedabad highway, he spotted the body of a shirtless man and informed the Waliv police.
“The man’s face was smashed with a rock and all his identity documents were missing. So we sent the body for a postmortem. We also searched the area thoroughly and found a saree and some used condoms and wrappers,” said an officer from unit 2 of the MBVV crime branch. The deceased was subsequently identified as Mahendra Kumar Dubey, who worked at a furniture manufacturing company in Sativali as a supervisor, the officer added.
The spot where Dubey’s body was found was isolated and often used by transgender prostitutes to conduct their business. The presence of condoms at the crime scene also indicated that he had sex preceding his murder. So the police started tracing transgenders who frequented the spot and detained Nalasopara resident Roopa Shaikh, whose call data records revealed that she was at the spot around the time of the murder on Friday.
“Shaikh denied that she was at the spot on Friday night. But the saree found at the spot matched one she was wearing in a photograph found on her mobile phone. So she was arrested for the murder based on suspicion,” said the officer. Her DNA sample has been sent to the forensic laboratory to check if it matches with the sample found on the condoms recovered from the spot, the officer added.
Shaikh was produced in court on Sunday and remanded in police custody till September 26.
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