Maharashtra: Rs 500 note lands wife-killer in jail in Nandurbar

Mumbai: A Rs 500 note that a murder accused from Nandurbar borrowed from his employer before going on the run cost him a lot more than he thought it would. The Nandurbar police correctly surmised his travel plans based on the amount, intercepted him and arrested him even as he was contemplating suicide.

According to the Nandurbar police, the accused has been identified as Arun Namdas (36), who stayed with his wife Rekha (28) and their seven-year-old daughter Vihar Colony, Nandurbar. The police said that in the intervening night of June 21 and June 22, Namdas slit Rekha’s throat with a kitchen knife after a fight and fled the scene. Their daughter, who had gone out of the house when the fight started, came back to see her mother dead and raised an alarm. The Upnagar police subsequently initiated inquiries into the matter and the Local Crime Branch (LCB) was instructed to conduct parallel investigations into the case.

“Namdas worked in a small shop in the Sindhi Colony in Nandurbar and we visited his workplace to see if we could find any clues about his whereabouts. We learned that just a little while before we arrived, he had borrowed Rs 500 from the shop owner and left in a hurry,” said police inspector Ravindra Kalamkar, Nandurbar LCB.

The police then discussed how and where Namdas could go with Rs 500 in his pocket and surmised that he might go by bus to his native place in Amalner, Jalgaon via Dhule. The police team rushed to the Nandurbar bus depot and learned that a bus had left for Dhule. The police team raced to the Dhule bus depot, where they confirmed that the bus from Nandurbar had just reached and offloaded its passengers.

The team then fanned out around the depot to look for Namdas and a short while later, found Namdas standing in the queue waiting for taxis to Amalner.

“We surrounded Namdas and tried to arrest him but he struggled violently, begging us to shoot him rather than taking him back to Nandurbar. We later learned that he had even thought of getting off the bus on the way to Dhule so that he could jump under a train, but the bus had proceeded from the spot before he could act on his thought,” Kalamkar said.

The police calmed Namdas down and brought him back to Nandurbar, where he was arrested and handed over to the Upnagar police station.

Namdas later told the police that on the night of the murder, he had taken his wife’s cell phone to watch videos on YouTube and she had objected, saying that he was violating her privacy. This led him to suspect that she was cheating on him and in the argument that ensued, he allegedly slit her throat with a kitchen knife, officers said.