How an online shopping sticker helped bust the myth of Bengaluru's 'serial killer'

An online shopping sticker helped the police solve the mystery of a woman’s body found in a drum at SMVT Bengaluru railway station.

On March 13, police found a decomposed female corpse in a blue drum near the main entrance of India’s first air-conditioned railway terminal. This was the third time that a woman’s body had been found at a railway station in Bengaluru since December 2022. The way the bodies were disposed of gave suspicions that it could be a case of serial killing.

But painstaking investigations by the railway police showed that the three murders weren’t related.

Also Read: Three bodies in as many months: Bengaluru railway stations’ vulnerability exposed under 'serial killer' scare

A sticker pasted on the drum helped the police identify the woman and her alleged killers. The sticker contained a QR code in addition to the name and address of the buyer, a man named Jamal. It was generated by a leading e-commerce website where he had bought some products (not the drum). He later pasted the sticker on the drum.

Police located his address and posted two plain-clothesmen outside the house. But they instead met a man named Intekhab, who had been looking for his missing wife, Tamanna, 27. He told the police that she hadn’t reached Bihar. The police got curious and asked him more about her.

Intekhab told them that he had left his wife at the Kalasipalyam house of a relative who had promised to send her to Bihar. But she hadn’t reached there.

Tamanna was the woman whose corpse was found in the drum. Police say she was killed by Intekhab’s elder brother Nawab and other relatives. Police have arrested three suspects — Kamaal, 21, Tanveer, 28 and Shakib, 25. All are from Bihar and work as labourers at City Market. Other suspects, including Nawab and Jamal, are at large.

The suspects were angry with Tamanna because she had deserted her first husband and their relative, a physically challenged guy named Afroz. Nawab and other family members believed that Intekhab had ruined their name back home in Bihar by marrying a woman who had left her first husband.

Intekhab told police that Tamanna had divorced her first husband. They decided to elope because Intekhab’s family didn’t accept their relationship. They married and moved to Bengaluru eight months ago.

Case to go to city police

Railway police say they will transfer the case to the Kalasipalyam police station after taking permission from the court.

“We will transfer the case to the Kalasipalyam police because the murder happened in their jurisdiction. The arrested suspects have confessed to killing Tamanna at a house in Kalasipalyam. They just kept the drum with her body at the SMVT station,” Dr S K Soumyalatha, Superintendent of Police, Railways, told DH.

A senior officer said that though the crime didn’t take place in the railway police’s jurisdiction, they took it as a challenge because people thought a serial killer was on the prowl killing women and throwing their bodies at railway stations.