Chennai triple murder: Police recover wife’s body
CHENNAI: Rummaging through hundreds of tonnes of rotting, stinking garbage piled up in Perungudi dump yard, the police and Greater Chennai Corporation workers finally found what they were searching for: the body of a 21-year-old woman, whose husband and child, all of two years, were killed in a shocking triple murder.
The investigation was set on course after the body of a man was found inside a gunny bag dumped along First Avenue, Indira Nagar, in Adyar on Republic Day. He was clobbered to death. During the inquiry, the police identified him as a 24-year-old from Nalanda, who had returned to Chennai on January 21 in search of work.
He had earlier worked as a security guard in Sriperumbudur for two years before spending several months in his native village.
The police detained three suspects – Lalit Prasad (42), Vikas Yadav (24), and Satyendran alias Santhosh Kumar (33), all from Nalanda – who revealed during questioning that they also murdered the man’s wife and child as well. The two-year-old boy’s body was found by the Buckingham Canal near Taramani’s CIT campus.
However, finding her body was not easy. The assailants had stuffed it inside a sack and put it inside a garbage bin.
By the time the police got the information and went to the spot, the civic body workers had picked it up along with the waste and dumped them all together inside the sprawling 250-acre Perungudi dump yard, three-fifths of which is covered in several lakh tonnes of garbage.
Soon, the police drafted the assistance of Corporation officials, who deputed workers to help find the sack buried in a sea of waste.
The search party focused on the area where garbage from Taramani is dumped, and used earthmovers and other equipment to sift through, officials said.
Finally, on Friday, three days after the search began, they found the sack containing the decomposing body.
It was sent to Government Royapettah Hospital, where the doctors will conduct a post-mortem examination to determine the exact cause of death – and check for possible sexual assault, as suspected by some officials.
The man’s body has been handed over to his elder brother, who works in Chennai, and has been taken to Bihar for the last rites. The toddler’s body is still in the hospital mortuary awaiting autopsy.