Two voice notes exchanged between a woman and her paramour led to the unravelling of the murder of the woman's husband, who was found dead in Amravati last week. The police have arrested both the accused, who were Forest Department personnel.
According to the Yavatmal police, the body of the deceased, Sachin Deshmukh, 33, was found at the bottom of a slope near the Melghat Tiger Reserve in Amravati on Saturday. Deshmukh was posted as a professor with a government college in Paratwada, Amravati, and would frequently visit his wife Dhanashri, 29, who stayed in Umerkhed in the neighbouring Yavatmal district. Dhanshri was employed as a guard with the Forest Department and posted at Melghat.
The police said that on Friday,Sachin went to Umerkhed and was supposed to return the same day. However, when he did not return till late at night, his parents registered a missing person complaint with the Umerkhed police. On Saturday, the Digras police found a body near Melghat, which was confirmed to be Sachin's.
“Prima facie, the death looked accidental, but a postmortem examination revealed that Sachin had been strangled to death. Dhanashri was picked up for inquiries and at the same time, we putin an official request for call detail records (CDRs) of both Sachin and Dhanashri,” said an officer with the Digras police station.
For several hours, Dhanashri was questioned and claimed innocence. She herself had called up Sachin's parents on Friday to ask if he had reached home safely, and said that there was nothing wrong between her and Sachin.
“We examined her cell phone as part of inquiries and found that she had deleted several voice notes sent to one person. However, two voice notes were still present in her phone, and on playing them, we became suspicious due to the content of the voice notes,” said superintendent of police (Yavatmal) Dilip Patil Bhujbal.
The voice notes indicated a romantic relationship between Dhanashri and the recipient, who was identified as her colleague in the Forest Department, Shivam Bachle, 30.
Bachle was immediately picked up for inquiries. “At the same time, the cellular service provider sent us the CDRs, which showed Sachin and Dhanashri together in Melghat on Friday. On a hunch, we putin an urgent request for Bachle’s CDRs and found that he, too, was in the same location as the couple during the same time period,” said an officer.
Confronted with the mounting evidence, Dhanashri and Bachle confessed that they were having an extramarital affair and had killed Sachin so that they could get married.
On Friday, Dhanashri allegedly took Sachin to Melghat, where the duo strangled Sachin. They then placed his body in a car and drove to Digras, where they threw the body off the slope to make it look like an accident, the police said.
The duo was placed under arrest onSunday and charged with murder and destruction of evidence under the Indian Penal Code.
