Man chops off woman's body, boils, feeds to dogs in Mumbai's Mira Road
Man hacks live-in partner's body into pieces, tries to dispose of it by pressure cooking and feeding it to stray dogs. Arrested in Mumbai.
A 32-year-old woman in suburban Mumbai was killed by her live-in partner of nine years who then used an electric saw to hack her body into so many parts that the police couldn’t pin a number. For three days after the alleged murder, Manoj Sane, 56, tried to dispose of the body. In his frantic efforts to evade detection, he pressure-cooked some body parts, roasted others, and ground some more in a mixer and fed them to stray dogs.
When the police entered the sparsely decorated seventh-floor apartment at Geeta Akashdeep society, a middle- class enclave of 10 buildings on Mira Road, they found themselves in a veritable house of horror.
“The kitchen was a complete mess — there were buckets and multiple pots and pans full of chopped and minced human flesh,” said assistant police inspector Rahul Bhagvat who along with police inspector Jilani Sayyad was the first to enter the two-bedroom house. The two officers were sent there by the Nayanagar station house officer to investigate neighbours’ complaints of the stench emanating from flat number 704.
When they broke open the door, the first thing they saw in the house was a bloodied electric saw. In the kitchen, other than in the three buckets, the pressure cooker on the gas stove and the pan on the platform they also found human bones in the basin. Adding to the horror was a pair of chopped off feet that sat on the platform.
On Wednesday night, the police arrested Sane for the murder of his live-in partner Saraswati Vaidya. The police say that Sane, who is employed at a kirana shop in the area, met Saraswati, who was orphaned, in 2014, and the two began living together. Sane, say the police, was sure that if he could dispose of Saraswati’s body in time, no one would ever come looking for her and he could escape undetected.
The gruesome manner in which the accused tried to dispose of the body brought back memories of the Shraddha Walkar murder case. In the Delhi case, Walkar’s live in partner Aaftab Poonawala killed her on May 18 last year, chopped her body into at least 35 pieces over two days, stored them in a refrigerator for about three months, and dumped the parts piece by piece. The crime remained undetected till November 12, when Poonawala was arrested. Delhi Police then spent the next few weeks recovering Walkar’s body parts in southern parts of the Capital, as well as Gurugram.
While the police say that Saraswati Vaidya and Manoj Sane did not interact with their neighbours and kept to themselves, it was on account of their neighbours that the killing came to light.
When Somesh Shrivastav, who stays in flat 701 across from Sane, came home for lunch from his office on Wednesday, he found himself overwhelmed by the stench on their floor and began to investigate the source. It led him to Sane’s locked flat. At 4.30pm he bumped into Sane on the stairs and told him about the foul smell. “He was carrying a black backpack and he seemed restless. He told me that he would return home at 10.30 in the night and resolve the issue,” said Shrivastav. But he says he found something amiss about Sane’s behaviour and decided to alert the police regardless. Unbeknownst to him, Sane returned home at 8pm instead of 10.30pm and was apprehended by the police. “It was only when we saw the news on television late on Wednesday night that we found out about the murder and also, for the first time, the names of our neighbours in flat 704,” Shrivastav said.
On Wednesday, after his arrest, Sane offered multiple stories to the police for Vaidya’s death. He first claimed that she had died by suicide on June 4 by consuming poison and fearing that he might be charged with abetment to suicide, he tried to get rid of the body instead of alerting either the neighbours or the police. Subsequently, however, he told the police that the two of them had had a fight as he suspected her of infidelity, and he stabbed her with a knife and then used the electric saw to cut her up.
On Thursday, after Sane was remanded to police custody, the police gathered Saraswati Vaidya’s body parts in multiple polythene bags and sent them to JJ Hospital for post mortem to ascertain the cause and time of her death, said Jayant Bajbale, deputy commissioner of police, Mira-Bhayander.
“We have also recovered a few knives and cutters from the kitchen in Sane’s flat and are trying to confirm which of them was the murder weapon,” said an officer from Nayanagar police station. Sane and Vaidya’s phone too has been sent for forensic analysis and to see if they wield any clues to their relationship and the murder.
Vaidya grew up in an orphanage in Borivali and was living there when she met Manoj Sane at a ration shop where he worked in 2014. They both belonged to the same community, and were single. They started meeting often. Vaidya, a school drop-out with little career prospects, grew increasingly dependent on Sane. The couple moved in together in the Mira Road flat three years ago. Save for the frequent and loud fights, they were quite private and none of their neighbours knew them. Sane has told the police that he suspected her of having affairs, and said that this was the reason for their fights.
Read here: Mumbai murder: Man kills live-in partner, chops up body and stays with parts in home
The crime, once again, spotlighted the growing numbers of cases involving violence against women, especially in situations where victims were at the receiving end of brutality at the hands of their intimate partners. it highlighted the importance of stronger law enforcement, rigorous punishment, and more social awareness in dealing with violence against women, and showed that police and the government need to do a lot more to safeguard women’s lives.