On May 14, 2016, D N Nagar police had recovered the body near Kukreja ground at Four Bungalows in Andheri. (Representational Image)

IT HAS been over two years since a partially decomposed body of a man was found in a manhole in Andheri (West). So far, the police have not been able identify the victim, making the search for the perpetrators of the crime that much more difficult.

While the police suspect that the victim was a teenager, its chase, which included tracking his footprints, questioning more than a hundred people as well as sifting through hours of CCTV footage and Call Data Records (CDR), seems to have hit a dead end.

On May 14, 2016, D N Nagar police had recovered the body near Kukreja ground at Four Bungalows in Andheri. Soon after, the Crime Branch had started a parallel investigation into the case.

The police said that after finding strangulation marks on the neck, it registered a case under sections 302 (punishment for murder) and 201 (destruction of evidence) of the IPC against unidentified persons. The body was sent for postmortem, which revealed that the youth had sustained more than five blunt injuries on the head and other body parts, leading to his death.

“The doctor said that the youth must have died three days before the body was found. Following this, we started looking at missing person’s records of DN Nagar police station,” said a police officer.
During inquiry, the police came to know that a man, identified as Sabban Babban Qureshi (21), had gone missing form his Andheri residence on May 10, 2016. The police sent Qureshi’s brother’s DNA samples for test but there was no match.

“We had also spotted a footprint on the ground where the body was found. So, we followed the footprint till N Dutta Marg in Andheri. We believed that it would either be of the deceased or the suspect, so we started scrutinising the CCTV footage of these areas,” said
an officer.

The police even came up with a sketch of the deceased and showed it to the residents of Bharatnagar, Navjeevan Nagar, Ganesh Nagar, Ratan Nagar, Kapaswadi, Indira Nagar and Geeta Nagar, but to no avail. “We started getting shopkeepers and watchmen of residential and commercial buildings for interrogation, but nobody identified him. As we thought that the deceased could have been from West Bengal or Bangladesh, we inquired whether someone had gone missing from those regions,” the officer said.

Eventually, the police started interrogating drug peddlers from Andheri and criminals who have a history in house breaking. “They also failed to identify him,” the officer added.