New Delhi (TIP)- 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, June 7, 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 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 parts of the Capital, as well as Gurugram.
While the police say that Saraswati Vaidya and Manoj Sane did not interact with their neighbours, 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. At 4.30pm he bumped into Sane on the stairs and told him about the foul smell.