Pune: Wife, daughter's boyfriend held for engineer's murder

PUNE: The wife of the mechanical engineer (49), whose partially burnt body was found on May 31 near Shikrapur, was arrested on Monday night, along with their daughter's boyfriend (23), on the charge of plotting and executing his murder.
The engineer's daughter (17), a Standard XI student, was detained after the district rural police claimed to have established her role also in the murder. Her arrested boyfriend, a techie, recorded a confession in this connection, the police said.
The body of the mechanical engineer was found at Sanaswadi near Shikrapur, along the Pune-Ahmednagar highway. The rural police on Tuesday claimed to have cracked the mystery behind the case. Inspector Pramod Kshirsagar of the Shikrapur police said, "Investigations revealed that the mechanical engineer worked with a Pune-based private company and stayed with his wife and daughter in a housing society at Wadgaonsheri. He was against his daughter's relationship with the techie, but his wife supported it."

Kshirsagar said, "The engineer's wife runs a private coaching class. All was not well between the couple. They would often quarrel over the affair of their daughter. Frustrated over his constant opposition to the relationship, his wife and daughter hatched a plot with the help of latter's boyfriend."
Citing the confession of the girl's boyfriend, the police inspector said, "On May 30, they bludgeoned the engineer with a blunt object and inflicted sharp injuries on him in the Wadgaonsheri flat. The trio kept the body in the flat for a day. They placed it in the hatchback car of the techie's (the girl's boyfriend)) father and drove to Sanaswadi. They set his body ablaze using petrol and left it in a partially burnt condition."
The police barely had any clue about the victim when his partially burnt body was recovered. "We registered a case of murder and a team each from the Shikrapur police and the rural police's crime branch started investigations. The teams checked footage of over 230 CCTV cameras along the highway. We zeroed in on a hatchback car that travelled between Shikrapur and Wadgaonsheri on May 31 and traced its owner to Wadgaonsheri," Kshirsagar said.
When its owner was contacted, he told the police that his son, a software engineer, had taken it out for some work on May 31. "We then took the techie into custody. During his sustained questioning, he unravelled the murder mystery. We also recovered the CCTV footage from the building of the victim, where the trio was seen clearly bringing the body down in the lift and taking it towards the parked car," Kshirsagar said.
"The techie told the investigators that they had watched several crime web series to learn about the execution of the murder and later dispose of the body," the police inspector said.