In what looks like a case almost straight out of American crime dramas – and possibly inspired by them – the police from West Bengal and Madhya Pradesh have stumbled upon a man who allegedly murdered not only his live-in partner but also his parents. The cops are now looking into whether the accused murdered anyone else that they do not know of yet.
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Dubbed the Anarkali-killer by some sections – because he buried his live-in partner Akanksha Sharma (28) under a block of marble in his house – 32-year-old Bhopal-resident Udayan Das has been arrested by the police and is being interrogated. He had first come under suspicion after Akanksha, who had told her parents back in West Bengal that she was moving to the US, stopped communicating with them.
When Akanksha's parents approached the police, they triangulated her mobile-phone's presence to Bhopal. They then tracked her whereabouts and travels in the city using GPS coordinates. It was during this investigation that they learnt that Akanksha, who hails from the Bankura district of West Bengal, had been lured to Bhopal by Das after they met on Facebook.
Das, who claimed to be an IITian and an Indian Foreign Services officer – but turned out to be only a high-school graduate -- had allegedly killed Akanksha in December 2016 after some discord between them while they were living together. He then buried her under a marble block using techniques he had learnt from – among other shows – the American procedural crime drama CSI.
After the police arrested him and interrogated him, he told them that he was originally from Raipur, and then confessed that he had killed his parents and buried their bodies in the garden there. These were exhumed on Sunday, February 5.
"We have found two human skeletons during digging at the family's Raipur house. We will now conduct a DNA test on the human remains. Udayan Das will also be brought to Raipur with court permission and questioned regarding the murder of two elderly persons in DD Nagar police station area in the Chhattisgarh capital," Raipur superintendent of police Sanjiv Shukla told reporters on Sunday. He was present when the skeletons were dug up.
