Voters’ list, tattoo help nab two killers, crack month-old Navi Mumbai case

NAVI MUMBAI: More than a month after a woman’s body was found in Belapur village and her three-year-old daughter abandoned on Palm Beach Road, the police not only managed to identify the deceased after going voters’ lists across the state, but also trace the two accused from her phone call records and arrested them. Their only lead was the woman’s name, Surekha Atangale, tattooed on her hand.
“The accused—Swaminath Gupta (41), a chauffeur, and Dwarkaprasad Gupta (40), an autorickshaw driver—have confessed to murdering Surekha Atangale, who lived in a Chembur slum and worked as a domestic help.On September 11, the duo sexually assaulted the woman when she was in an inebriated state. When she threatened to lodged a complaint, Swaminath used a rubber pipe to strangle her, while Dwarkaprasad smothered her. They then drove the woman’s three-year-old daughter, who was asleep, in the auto to Palm Beach Road,” said senior inspector Vishnu Redkar, NRI police station.
The girl, who was saved by a motorist and handed over to the police, identified herself as Chakuli. As the girl kept asking for her “aai” (mother in Marathi), an officer put two and two together and the body was shown to her. She identified the body as that of her mother’s and said her name was Surekha.
Redkar said, “We followed up with every Atangale on the voters’ list from across the state. We found a Kusum Athangale in Chembur’s Vashi Nagar slums, but she did not know the deceased. We then showed photographs of Surekha and her daughter in the nearby slums. Finally, Surekha’s grandmother, who lives in Siddharth Nagar slums, identified the duo.”
She led the police to to Surekha’s father, Mahadev Shinde, who gave his daughter’s mobile number to the police. The cops obtained Surekha’s call data records and arrested Swaminath, who lives in Belapur village. But by then Dwarkaprasad had fled to his hometown in UP. “When our team went there, he fled to Varanasi and later to Allahabad. We picked up his cousins from Chembur who compelled him to return to the city. We nabbed him in Tilak Nagar on Tuesday.”
The police will hand over the child, who is at the Nerul orphanage, to her maternal grandfather as her father has did not come to take her custody.