Victim’s fingers & stop for ‘tea’: What led cops to IT couple in domestic help murder

NT Correspondent

Chennai/Bengaluru

Six fingers on the victim’s hands and the CCTV footage of a car’s suspicious movement have led the police to crack a case of murder, which happened in Karnataka’s Bengaluru, with the perpetrators then dumping the body in Tamil Nadu’s Salem, reported The Print. On September 30 this year, the body of a teenage girl was recovered from a travel bag off the Salem-Coimbatore National Highway in Tamil Nadu. The travel bag, found by locals near a marriage hall in Salem’s Sangagiri, and likely abandoned four to five days earlier, had started emanating a foul stench, leading to the discovery of the body.

The body showed bruising, indicating the girl was thrashed near her ears and on other parts. Subsequently, an FIR was filed at the nearby Sankari police station in Salem, but nobody in the vicinity could identify the body. In the following days, Salem SP Gautam Goyal formed a 15-officer special team to look for clues. “There were no missing person cases filed in Tamil Nadu or the neighbouring states of Kerala and Karnataka, and attempts to trace the unique suitcase, or the polythene cover and tape used to cover the victim’s face yielded no results,” said M. Senthil Kumar, the team’s leader and inspector at the Magudanchavadi police station in Salem, speaking to ThePrint.

While some of the officers coordinated with the neighbouring states to identify the victim, others perused the CCTV cameras of the marriage hall and a nearby toll gate and petrol pump from 26-29 September. “We identified 114 vehicles that passed through the area and narrowed our search to a few cars,” Kumar said. Subsequent investigation revealed the suspicious movement of one car near the toll gate, he said. The vehicle, registered in Karnataka, was associated with the Bengaluru address of one Abhinash Sahu (41). Kumar said that when the police contacted Sahu, “he said he stopped the car there to have tea.

But there were no tea shops near the area”. Alerted by his responses, the police team visited Sahu’s residence in Bengaluru nearly one month into the investigation. In Bengaluru, the crucial clue that the victim had six fingers soon led to her identification. After that, the police charged Odisha-born Abhinash Sahu and his wife from Karnataka’s Gulbarga, Ashwini G. Patil both IT professionals in Bangalore with the torture and murder of their 15-year-old house help, Sumaina, over dissatisfaction with her work. On 24 October, when the police reached Bengaluru, Sahu and his wife had already vacated their residence and fled to Odisha. However, during a search, the police found the kind of polythene cover and tape used over the victim’s face.

On looking at the details of Sahu’s bank account, the police also found that he transferred Rs 6 lakh to an advocate a day after they called him regarding the movement of his car on the highway. The cook from the neighbouring household told the police that a young girl with six fingers had been working at Sahu’s household, and the girl was not with the couple when they vacated their house. “The cook told us that Sahu brought the girl, Sumaina, from his hometown to care for his child,” Kumar said. The police team then started tracking Sahu’s mobile phone number and reached his hometown in Odisha’s Jajpur based on the tower location of his newly inserted SIM card.

Finally, on 29 October, the couple was arrested 120 km from Sahu’s residence in Odisha, from the house of Sahu’s friend. The duo are now in judicial custody at Salem Central Jail, Tamil Nadu. Kumar said the murdered girl’s parents passed away earlier, but the police have informed her distant relatives about her death. He also said that steps are underway to transfer the case to Bengaluru police as the murder took place in the city.