Police arrested a couple and two of their family members on Thursday for allegedly killing a man in their Tangra residence in southeast Kolkata and then disposing of the body in a canal along EM Bypass earlier in March.
The police said Jhunnu Rana, a resident of Tangra, was reported missing earlier this month.
Based on the complaint lodged by Rana’s family, the police started an investigation.
CCTV footage showed him last with a man named Golam Rabbani. They were seen entering Rabani’s flat together, the police said.
“But we got no footage of Jhunnu Rana coming out. It was seen that Golam Rabbani came out of his flat alone. He returned and after a few hours he was seen coming out of the flat along with his wife, Noor Ayesha,” said an officer of the homicide squad of the detective department.
The cops said the motive behind the alleged murder was very personal.
The police said though Rabbani and his wife kept changing SIM cards to evade arrest, they were arrested from Delhi on Thursday.
“After the incident, they had taken out the body in a gunny bag and dumped it in the canal under the Amdebkar bridge on EM Bypass. They carried the body in a van with the help of a relative named Sheikh Riyaz,” the officer said.
The couple left the city the same night. They took a train from Santragachhi to Odisha from where they boarded another train to Bangalore, according to the police.
By the time the police traced their whereabouts in Bangalore, they had allegedly fled to Delhi in a bus taking a detour through Hyderabad.
The police said they have arrested Rabbani and his wife Noor Ayesha from Delhi while Sheikh Riyaz and Imran — another relative of the family who allegedly aided in tempering the evidence by painting the wall of Rabbani’s house to cover the bloodstains of the deceased — have been arrested from Kolkata.
