In October last year, as the winter season was about to set in, Kajal Gupta had come to her mother’s house in Dabri. There she would often sit out on the mud pile in the flat’s third floor balcony and have food while soaking in the sun. Little did she know that she was sitting on the corpse of a software engineer, which lay buried under the mud, she said on Friday.

The engineer’s body was recovered on October 8 last year, almost three years after he was killed, when Gupta and her family members requested their landlord, 86-year-old Vikram Singh, to get the balcony of their flat renovated.

During the renovation, when the boundary of the balcony was demolished, labourers found a human skeletal remains and alerted the police. The man was later identified as Jai Prakash Maharana (26), once a tenant at Singh’s three storey building, that has 11 flats.

Jai shared the flat with his maternal uncle Bijay Kumar Maharana, who police arrested from Hyderabad on January 6 this month, almost three years after the murder. Police said Bijay disliked Jai’s closeness to his girlfriend and therefore bludgeoned him to death on February 7, 2016.

Police said that Bijay, who had been hiding in Hyderabad, had changed his looks and had cut contacts with his family and friends was trying his luck in regional films.

Gupta, who still lives in the house, on Friday termed her experience as “haunting”. “It was hard to believe we had already spent about ten days with a dead body buried right next to us. Even the labourers who were digging were shocked. They silently left the spot and went straight to the police,” said Gupta, whose mother, younger sister and brother live in the house as permanent residents.

Gupta, who is married and is a frequent visitor to the house, said that on Wednesday police brought Bijay to the house to recreate the crime scene.

“ While recreating the crime scene at the house, Bijay showed police the spot where Jai was sleeping. At the spot, Bijay had attacked him with a ceiling fan motor. This is the exact spot where we sleep. I have been staying here for the last two months. The murderer(Bijay) also gave a detailed description to the police about how he buried the body and planted saplings on it. We saw his face. It didn’t have any remorse,” said, Gupta, a bank employee.

Gupta also said that Jai’s mother had come to Delhi and she stayed in the same flat for a few days after the body was recovered. She had also stayed in the house when her son went missing, unaware that her son was buried within metres of where she was sleeping .

Vikram Singh, the landlord who owns the flat, said he had visited the house when Bijay spread rumours that Jai had gone missing. “I had gone to the house but found Jai’s room locked. That was the only way to the balcony. Bijay had locked the room from outside and told me that Jai has gone to Vaishno Devi,” Singh said.

Police officers said they are yet to recover the fan motor with which Bijay had bludgeoned Jai. “He told us that he washed the blood on the fan and took it out on the pretext of getting it repaired. He said he threw the fan in a nearby drain. We searched for the fan but are yet to recover it,” said an investigator.

First Published: Jan 12, 2019 15:16 IST