The girl remained unidentified in the initial phase of the investigation. (File/Representational) Days after a three-year-old girl was found murdered in Khadki area of Pune, the police arrested her 32-year-old mother and her 26-year-old paramour for allegedly strangling the child to death because she was “proving to be an obstacle in their relationship”. The police said the case was cracked with the help of a label on the jacket of the woman’s paramour which the man was wearing at the time of committing the crime.
On the afternoon of March 2, a local rickshaw driver spotted the body of the child lying under a tree at a secluded location near a defence establishment in Khadki. As the police took over the case, the primary report of the autopsy suggested that the girl was strangled to death. A joint investigation by the Khadki police station and the Crime Branch was launched. The girl remained unidentified in the initial phase of the investigation.
While multiple police teams started looking at various leads available, one dedicated team was assigned to check the CCTV cameras installed on the roads approaching the location where the body was found. One camera footage showed a man and a woman carrying the girl child from Khadki railway station to Khadki Bazar. In the footage of another security camera, they were seen leaving the area without the girl. The probe then zeroed in on the man and woman.
“The jacket that the man was wearing had a label ‘Sangharsh Group, Khirpuri’, suggesting the man had some connection with Khirpuri village from Balapur taluka of Akola district of Maharashtra. The officials from Akola police were contacted and a team was sent to the area for further probe,” said an officer from Khadki police station.
Working on the leads gathered in Akola, the police identified the suspect as Santosh Devman Jamnik (26) and the woman was identified as a 32-year-old woman from the village and the mother of the deceased child. The identity of the woman and her deceased child have been withheld by the police.
A crime branch officer added, “The woman had four children and is separated from her alcoholic husband. The deceased girl was her youngest child. Jamnik, with whom she had a relationship, had started working at a construction site in Pune. The woman moved to Pune recently along with the girl to live with Jamnik. She left her three other children with her parents. The probe suggests that they looked at the child as an obstacle in their relationship. The night before the girl was found dead, they had beaten her up and strangled her to death and then left her body at the secluded location in Khadki.” The two were placed under arrest Monday and remanded to police custody for 10 days.