Police said the dead woman was 26 years old and the killer had cut her body into 30 pieces and stored in a fridge of an apartment in Vyalikaval, Bengaluru. Stench emanating from the apartment prompted neighbours to call police for a check.
The police, traditionally, expressed suspicions as to the fact that the body parts were likely stored in the fridge for some time. The body has been identified, Additional Commissioner of Police (West) Satish Kumar said.
The reaction is fairly typical: We will provide further details following an investigation. She had been living in Bengaluru, even though she was from another state in India,” Mr Kumar added.
A dog squad and a fingerprint team will have cordoned off the crime scene, a team accompanied from the Forensics Science Laboratory (FSL) has been summoned, he said.
Bengaluru: The Victim lived alone
This is a one BHK house situated in the area of Vyalikaval police station. The mutilated severed parts of a young 26 years girl were discovered and packed in a refrigerator. On the face of it, it is clear that this incident did not take place today… We have indentified the girl, but let us completer the initial investigation,” Mr Kumar added.
The first responders of the police team that entered the apartment found the 165-litre, single-door fridge switched on with maggots crawling over the decomposed body, according to the news agency IANS. The grim murder is similar to another horrifying murder of a 27-year-old Shraddha Walkar in Delhi this year 2022. She was murdered by her boyfriend Aaftab Amin Poonawala, 29 and her body was beheaded and severed into 35 portions. Poonawala then dumped the body parts in a wooded area close to their Kenya flat.
Adding details, ACP Kumar said that the victim, who had been working at a Mall in Malleswaram was living alone in the single bedroom house in which she was found.found was discovered.
According to the police, Mahalakshmi’s husband Hemant Das who is a worker at a hermitage outside Bengaluru city was informed of his wife’s tragedy and he immediately came to Malleswaram, however, Mahalakshmi was all alone as her husband travels for work and resides out of the city.
The ACP said that the road leading to the building in which the victim lives has been closed, personnel from the dog squad and forensic experts have also been used to investigate the crime scene.
They added: “The body has been identified.” The probe is going on. We will provide additional information once investigations have been conducted. She is currently residing in Karnataka but she belongs to other state,” the senior officer said to journalists.
Police reported that they have opened a case and have begun investigating the cruel murder.
Shraddha Walker rerun
The style of the killing introduced at Malleswaram resembles the brutal killing of the Delhi resident Shraddha Walker by her partner Aftab Poonawalla on May 18, 2022 situated in Mehrauli, Delhi.
Poonawala, 28, had allegedly killed Walkar by repetitive smothering and then chopped her body into 35 parts which he put in a 300 litres fridge in his house for almost three weeks before throwing the body parts around the city.
How did the Shraddha Murder Case become a Copycat Murder template?
Known as the ‘fridge murder’ by the media that surrounded it, the murder of Shraddha Walkar by her live-in partner Aaftab Poonawala in 2022 did incorporate coverage of more such murders that involved dismembered bodies and refrigeration.
In the most recent case from Delhi’s Najafgarh, where a man chopped up his live-in partner’s remains and stored them in a fridge at his dhaba, the media soon began making connections to Shraddha’s case.
There was another such case of Shraddha just a day after it was covered, on February 15. This time it was a man killing his live in partner and chopping her body, although he did not stuff her in, in a mattress in Maharashtra’s Palghar.
The first time many such incidents started being reported across the country was after Aaftab Poonawala was apprehended in November of last year and the murder of Shraddha in May 2022. Whether this accused used Shraddha case as a homicidal pattern, it can be true at least the CBI and media used Shraddha’s case was definitely high once Aaftab’s method of slaughtering and slicing the body of Shraddha was evealed on the media.
But Aaftab himself might have been inspired by a Dehradun case The response to this murder by the police and the people is fairly telling of the mentality among the population.
More than a decade before the incident of Shraddha murder, a Dehradun based man, Rajesh Gulati killed his wife, Anupama Gulati and cut her dead body into 72 pieces. Like Aaftab, who later did to Shraddha, Rajesh mutilated Anupama’s body and dispersed the parts throughout the Uttarakhand capital.
Delhi, November 2022: Two women and a boy playback Aftab’s murder procedure.
Imitating Aaftab’s mannerisms of storing the bodies in a fridge before dismembering them and spreading the parts across the Mehrauli forest, a case was on November 28,2022. This time around, a married woman killed his second husband with the help of the second husband son from another marriage, can you believe it.
To elaborate it more, Poonam Das had reconducted with Anjan Das after she got widowed from her first spouse. But as it happened Anjan also had another family with eight children (Deepak Das being one of the sons). Angry that she considered it an adulterous relationship, Poonam and Deepak set about murdering Anjan, dissecting the body and putting the pieces into a fridge before taking the parts to different areas of Delhi.
Nov-Dec 2022: Alike cases from UP, West Bengal, Rajasthan
In fact, similar dismembering episodes were reported in November 2022 coming from both Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal. In the former case, Prince Yadav, native to Azamgarh, lost his cool when his longtime girlfriend, Aradhna Prajapati, married someone else. So, Prince and his cousin killed her through strangling. They then proceeded to chop up the body into six pieces and throw them in a well outside the village.
Baruipur in West Bengal, former naval and civil servant officer Ujjwal Chakraborty was involved in a quarrel with his son which turned violent when the son pushed him back causing his head hit a chair. The son then cut the body into five pieces when Ujjwal fell unconscious. Under the guidance of his mother, he took it and spread it across Baruipur only to admit to the murder himself a few days later.
Last December, again in Jaipur, Anuj Sharma murdered his widowed aunt, cut her body into ten parts with a marble cutting machine and buried the parts in different parts of a forest on the Delhi Road.
This word “Shraddha” has become a threat.
This is how heinous Shraddha Walkar’s murder was that the killing method along with the name of the victim has become a threat. There was a case in UP’s Etah district only this month when Shubham Rajput slit his wife’s throat after suspecting her of infidelity just like Shraddha’s accused.
Much earlier, in November, a man named Mohammad Faiz was arrested in Kanpur when he on the provocation that he will kill the minor girl aged 17 years and cut her into pieces “like Shraddha” if she refused to marry him.
Why did Shraddha Walkar’s murder become the perfect template to imitate?
It is good to remind our readers that copycat murders have been around for decades. India Today’s Tanseem Haider whose recent project involves reporting on the Najafgarh dhaba case says she was quite surprised by some of the mainstream murders including the 2006 Nithari serial murders and the Neeraj Grover murder case in 2008 where bodies were mutilated before being dumped.
Though the new age social media platforms can be said to have helped in increasing coverage of crimes like that of Shraddha Walkar murder, the two relevant points were ‘preservation of evidence’ and ‘destruction of evidence’. As for all, if the refrigerator does not want to dump it all together at that moment, it is the perfect tool to store the victim’s remains.
Regarding the local news coverage of such copycat murders, it has always been a trend that local news copies get more coverage if the murder looks like a national issue (nowadays like Shraddha’s murder). “The only difference that we have witnessed since the post 2000s is that now social media clearly aids even the finer points to be reported quicker.” Which of course, tends to make it easier for other cases, with similar levels of detail, to be noticed.
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