Stench made neighbours look for dead rat

MUMBAI: Foul smell prompted three neighbours of Manoj Sane (46), accused of killing his live-in partner and chopping and pressure cooking her body in his Mira Roadflat, to scan their homes as well as the building terrace for a dead rat. When nothing was found in their homes, they knocked at their next-door neighbour’s flat to check for any rodent but got no response.When cops broke open the flat, the smell made most of them vomit.
The victim, Saraswati Vaidya (34), was murdered in flat 704 in the morning of June 4. By noon, Sane had shopped for tools to chop the body. On Monday morning, when members of the other three flats—701, 702, 703—on the seventh floor of Geeta Akashdeep building stepped out to get into the lift, they complained of some foul smell. On Tuesday, the smell got stronger and the three families, including two tenants, cleaned their homes to look for dead rodents.

“We three families have been very close. Sane and Vaidya rarely interacted with us. So while we cleaned our homes, we did not tell the couple about it,” said Anu Srivastava, Sane’s next-door neighbour at flat 703. None of the families could find the source of the stench in their homes. Anu along with her husband Vivek had moved into the flat about a year ago. They told TOI that except for exchanging pleasantries, they never interacted with the couple.

On Tuesday, Vivek and Sane stepped into the lift together. As the smell was unbearable, Vivek asked his wife to take away his year-old daughter who had come to see him off. “Sane surely heard me talking about the foul smell and may have then been in a hurry to dispose of the body parts,” said Vivek.

By Wednesday morning, the stench was unbearable. The most affected was flat 701 belonging to Niraj Srivastava. “On Wednesday, the passage was stinking and it became certain that the smell was coming from flat 704,” said a family member. The neighours knocked at Sane’s flat—it did not have a doorbell—but got no response. Residents’ suspicion grew as they could smell an air freshener when they came close to Sane’s flat.
Watch Mira Road murder case: 'Killer' Manoj Sane chopped Saraswati Vaidya's body parts, pressure-cooked; Police recovered chainsaw, tile cutter machine