3 arrested for murdering woman

Mumbai: Three persons, including a BEST bus driver, were arrested for murdering a woman and disposing of her mortal remains in a pit in Raigad. The Mankhurd police said the woman was murdered for demanding that one of the accused marry her. The police exhumed the woman’s body two months after the incident and her autopsy revealed that she died of a blunt injury to her head and was also strangulated before being stuffed inside the pit.

The arrested accused have been identified as Sunil Shirke (44), Ramchandra Jadhav (36) and Vijaysinh More (22), who works as a bus driver. The police began the investigation after the victim, Rohini Ghorpade (28), was reported missing on November 16 last year. She had left to attend a marriage two days before going missing.

The preliminary probe revealed that Ghorpade and Shirke worked at the municipal hospital in Vashi and had a love affair. The duo had been having a spat as she insisted that Shirke marry her.

“We later found that Shirke and his accomplices left for the former’s home town at Mangaon in a vehicle on November 14 when she left to attend a marriage. More drove the vehicle and after reaching Shirsad, they murdered her,” said Shahaji Umap, deputy commissioner of police, Zone VI.

They hit her on her head with a wooden log and later strangled her with her saree. The body was disposed of in a pit that they had been dug and kept ready in the same village two days before the murder. The investigators said that after the conspiracy was unravelled, the body was exhumed and sent for conducting an autopsy.

The samples of her remains have been kept for further analysis and the reports stated that her death was unnatural.