MUMBAI: A 56-year-old businessman is believed to have been pushed in front of a running train and killed by a couple with whom he had a fight at
Mulund station on Saturday. The
Kurla GRP have registered a case of murder and are trying to identify the couple on the basis of
CCTV grabs.
Deepak
Patwa, the deceased, lived in Mulund with his wife and son and was a trader in iron. According to his relatives, he worked in Powai and would board a train at Mulund station between 2pm and 2.30pm.
On Saturday afternoon, the GRP was alerted after a passenger was run over by an oncoming train. The police took him to a public hospital where he was pronounced dead.
Officers then searched his person and found a cellphone. They checked the call log and redialled the last dialled number. It belonged to an acquaintance who identified the deceased as Patwa. The acquaintance also informed Patwa’s family who rushed to the hospital.
After the autopsy was completed and the body was handed over to us, I went through CCTV footage of the station along with police personnel. We noticed that cameras on platform 3 had captured Patwa standing near the south-end of the station close to an FOB. In less than a minute, a man and a woman seem to have a fight with him over some issue. It snowballs into a scuffle and they knowingly push him before an oncoming train,” said Patwa’s brother-in-law
Ajit Shah, who lodged a complaint with the Kurla GRP.
The police then dug out grabs from other cameras at the station to get more information on the couple. “The male accused appears to be in his mid-thirties and is dressed in a white shirt and black trouser. He appears between 5.5-5.7 feet tall. The female accused appears to be in her early thirties and is around five feet tall. We are now trying to find out over what Patwa and the couple argued. His relatives have never seen the couple before. We are probing whether he knew the couple and had an altercation with them before. But it’s very clear that Patwa wasn’t pushed accidentally; the accused knew that a train was arriving and landing on the tracks would kill Patwa,” a police official said.
CCTV grabs also show a bunch of women passengers running down from the foot over-bridge and walking up to where Patwa stood. “We don't know if these women passengers are connected to the case or not. The motive will be clear only when we know who the couple was and what they argued about. We are checking Patwa’s phone call records,” the official said.
A prayer meeting was organised in Patwa’s memory by his relatives on Monday.
