Attendant nabbed in Gujarat train within 12 hours of 86-year-old's murder in Mumbai

MUMBAI: Within 12 hours of the murder of an 86-year-old man in Santacruz, police arrested the accused-his 30-year-old male attendant hired just a week before the crime- from the general compartment of Saurashtra Express in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, on Monday.
Santacruz police team brought the accused, Krishna Pariyar, to Mumbai on Tuesday. He had planned to flee to Nepal with a gold chain worth Rs 50,000 he stole from the victim, Muralidhar Naik, after strangling him early on Monday. Pariyar boarded Saurashtra Express from Dadar the same morning. Police are verifying his antecedents; he had provided his residential details as Kasturi Nagar in Bengaluru to the Saki Naka-based agency, Home Care At Home. Police are also probing whether the accused had planned the murder soon after he was hired on May 1.
Pariyar was provided as a replacement by the same agency from where the earlier male attendant had been hired after he went on leave. "Technical assistance helped us track Pariyar to Saurashtra Express. Our counterpart DCP in Ahmedabad helped us locate Pariyar on the train. The Ahmedabad GRP team searched the general compartments of Saurashtra Express and nabbed Pariyar. A probe is on to find whether the agency that provided his service has kept his antecedents," said Satyanarayan Chaudhary, joint commissioner of police (law and order).
The crime was discovered around 8am on Monday when the Naik couple's cook, Nirmala J B (35), reached their flat, prepared the morning tea and breakfast, and called him. "When my father did not respond, she walked into the bedroom and found his legs tied with a bedsheet, his hands with a pyjama and its strings while his mouth was taped and a pyjama was tied around his neck," Naik's daughter Sangeeta Garg (55), a dentist who resides in Wadala, told TOI.
The cook ran out and alerted neighbours. They called the police after calling a doctor who declared him dead. DCP (Zone IX) Krishnakant Upadhaya supervised teams that included Santacruz police senior inspector Rajendra Kane, inspectors Mahesh Bolkotagi and Amar Patil, assistant inspectors Prakash Lahane and Tushar Sawant.
Garg said, "The suspect was normal in his behaviour and spoke to my brothers and our families when we visited our parents on Sunday." Garg said she and her two brothers met their parents every week. She said her father was jovial and worked till 2019 as a consultant. Her mother, Uma, is a retired BARC scientist. "The post-mortem was done on Tuesday. Our relatives from Kerala, Bengaluru and Mumbai have reached the city to perform the final rites. No one is ready to believe such a thing has happened in the family."