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In a bizarre incident, the police in Vadodara found a second body of a murdered man, who was cremated by his family on May 1.
The case details suggest that 45-year-old local businessman Suraj Shah was murdered by his lawyer and two others. Lawyer Vijay Ravji Rohit had apparently murdered Suraj as he was unable to repay a loan of Rs 4.6 lakh he had taken from the victim a couple of months ago.
The lawyer roped in two other men — Shrikand Suresh Pawar and Mehul Santosh Mane — to carry out his plan on April 25. The three apparently killed Suraj and threw his body in Narmada canal near Vitoj with a stone tied to his legs.
A dead body floating in the canal was recovered by local police, who took along Mehul for identification. Though Mehul insisted that the body was not of the murdered businessman, his family claimed it saying it was, indeed, Suraj. The police later took the body for post-mortem and handed it over to Suraj’s family for last rites. The family cremated the body on May 1.
Twist in police tale
However, the twist came when police recovered another dead body from Narmada canal, this time from another location. The police suspected that this was, in fact, Suraj’s body and not the earlier one they had handed over to his family.
The three accused had told the police that they had tied a stone to the legs of Suraj before throwing him in the canal. The body found earlier did not have a stone tied to it, while the second body matched the description, strengthening police suspicion that it was indeed Suraj. The clothes too matched the attire that Suraj sported in a CCTV footage of the day he vanished. While Suraj is believed to have worn a half-sleeved T-shirt, the dead body found earlier had a full-sleeved shirt on.
“There appears to be some kind of mix-up,” Shruti Shah, wife of Suraj, told media persons.
The family on Friday accepted that the second body was that of Suraj and cremated it. The police, for its part, claimed that it had collected the DNA samples of the dead body cremated earlier and that they would begin an investigation to identify the person.