The Railway police have arrested three persons and are on the lookout for five others said to be involved in the murder of a 27-year-old woman whose body was found stuffed inside a plastic drum at the Sir M Visvesvaraya Terminal (SMVT) in Baiyappanahalli in East Bengaluru on the evening of Monday, 13 March.
Soon after the decomposed body was found by the Railway Police Force (RPF) personnel, the dog squad and Forensic Science Laboratory (FSL) experts rushed to the spot, cordoned off the area, and conducted their investigation.
The police identified the deceased as Tamanna, the wife of one Mohammed Imthiaqup.
“Imthiaqup’s elder brother Nawab (32), who is an AC mechanic in KR Puram, is the prime accused in this case,” Superintendent of Police (SP) Soumyalatha told South First.
“He conspired with seven of his friends and plotted the murder of his sister-in-law due to a family dispute,” she added.
According to the police, all the eight accused — including the five who are on the run — are from the Araria district of Bihar, and were known to the victim, who was also from their same village.
The three arrested have been identified as Kamal, Tanvir and Shaquip. All of them work as coolies and loaders in the City Market area and stay in a room in Kalasipalya, the police said.
Nawaz, the prime accused is also on the run.
“We have definite clues about him, and we will secure him at the earliest,” the police added.
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Motive and conspiracy
A senior railway police officer said: “Tamanna was earlier married to one Afroz, a differently-abled person, in Araria in Bihar. She divorced him and started a relationship with Mohammed Imthiaqup, who was Afroz’s cousin.”
The official added that Tamanna married Imthiaqup on 22 July, 2022, and the couple came to Bengaluru and settled in Jigani.
“It has been around eight months since the couple came to Bengaluru,” Soumyalatha said.
Nawaz eventually came to know about his younger brother Imthiaqup’s marriage with Tamanna, said the police. Very annoyed, he apparently told his brother to leave her.
Nawaz is said to have told Imthiaqup that it was his first wedding, but it was Tamanna’s second wedding — after she deserted her husband because he was handicapped.
Her first husband (Afroz) was still alive, and also from their family. According to Nawaz, Tamanna lured his younger brother Imthiqup into marrying her.
It was then that Nawaz and seven of his childhood friends conspired to kill Tamanna and decided to execute their plan on 12 March, said the police.
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The crime
On 12 March, Tamanna and Imthiaqup were apparently invited by Nawaz to his room, from where they were to apparently could go for an outing to see all of Bengaluru.
Nawaz somehow managed to separate Imthiaqup and Tamanna, and told him later that he was going to send Tamanna back to Bihar to her parents for some days, said the SP.
It was then Nawaz and his friends allegedly strangled and killed Tamanna.
The group of friends are said to have then broken her legs so her body could fit inside the small drum that would later be found by the cops.
Once the body was in the drum, the suspects allegedly put a bag over the body, sealed the drum’s lid, and kept it in their room.
The next day, Nawaz and four of his friends carried the drum in an auto-rickshaw to the Sir M Visvesvaraya Terminal (SMVT) in Baiyappanahalli, intending to take it elsewhere on a train and dispose of it there, so they could mislead the police and the murder could go undetected, said the cops.
A lot of passengers carry plastic drums filled with clothes or utensils, and they thought nobody would suspect them if they carried the body in such a drum, said a railway police officer privy to the investigation.
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Fate plays a role
The five of them apparently went to the Baiyappanahalli railway terminal around 7.30 pm on Monday and kept the drum near the entrance of the terminal facing the road.
They are then said to have hung around in front of the railway station for more than an hour, while one of them went inside to check for trains and their destinations.
However, the South Western Railway (SWR) that day cancelled, diverted, and regulated a total of 10 trains — not only on that route but others as well — due to non-interlocking work at Haveri in connection with the doubling of tracks between the Devaragudda and Haveri stations.
While four trains were cancelled, four more were diverted, and two were regulated for 100-130 minutes, according to the SWR public relations officer.
Since there were no trains plying that evening for a long time, and the crowd at the railway station was swelling, the four men abandoned the drum in front of the railway station and fled the spot.
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In hot pursuit
According to Soumyalatha, the drum in which Tamanna’s body was stuffed had a sticker on it. The sticker pointed to a shop address in Kalasipalya, where the drum was purchased.
It was with the help of this sticker that two of the accused — Tanvir and Shaquip — were tracked down and picked up from Kalasipalya on Wednesday, the SP said.
One more accused — Kamal — was reportedly arrested near the Baiyappanahall railway station terminal the same day.
The SP also said the people who were identified on the CCTV footage were all on the run, and this included Nawaz the prime accused.
Based on a complaint from the RPF personnel who first saw the body, the Baiyappanahalli railway police registered a case of murder and destruction of evidence and booked eight people for the crime.
Tamanna’s family members were informed about the incident, and a post-mortem examination was performed on her body.
The SP also confirmed that this was an isolated murder case and had no links to the deaths of the two other women whose bodies were found recently — one inside a train and the other at a railway station.
One body was found inside a drum abandoned at the Yesvanthpura railway station in January this year.
The other body was found stuffed inside a gunny sack in an unreserved coach on the Bangarapet-SMVT Bangalore MEMU special train in December last year.
