Vadodara: Three days after they claimed to have found the body of Suraj Shah from a water canal, the cops on Thursday said that it wasn’t his body.
The police said that on Thursday it fished out the ‘original’ body of Shah, who was murdered by three persons, from a canal near Kalol in Panchmahals. Shah’s body was found about 12 kilometres from where it was dumped by the accused.
Embarrassed over the goof-up, the police will now hand over the unidentified body that it found on Tuesday to Waghodia police and file a case of accidental death. “When we found the body of an unknown person three days ago, we had our doubts that it was of Shah. That body was so disfigured that it was impossible to recognize it. So we had continued our search in the canal,” said Manoj Sashidhar, city police commissioner.
“The accused trio had shown us the spot where they dumped the body. The first body we found was upstream in canal. Usually dead bodies flow downstream with the water so we had our apprehensions. Also, the first body we found had half-sleeve shirt while Shah was wearing full-sleeve shirt when he was kidnapped. On Thursday, we found another body from the canal and investigations confirmed that it was of Shah,” Sashidhar told TOI.
The body will now be sent for post-mortem and handed over to Shah’s family. The accused trio was drunk when it dumped the body in the canal so it was not sure about the exact spot. The investigators also found out the shop in Jarod from where the accused had purchased the rope which they used to strangulate Shah.
Shah was kidnapped by advocate Vijay Rohit and his two accomplices on April 25. He was offered liquor by Rohit and when Shah got drunk, the trio strangulated him. Rohit told that Shah had given him loan of Rs 50,000 but he kept demanding Rs 4.60 lakh from him. So Rohit decided to kill Shah.
Shah’s family had approached the cops a day after he went missing following which the Karelibaug police begun search for him. “Rohit is very sharp and cunning. He had made an elaborate plan and he thought that he would get away,” Sashidhar said.