A woman was offered a lift by one of her neighbours in his app cab and stabbed to death inside the vehicle on Southern Avenue before being dumped off the Bypass on Friday evening, police said.

The neighbour, Shiv Shankar Manna, 35, who owns and drives the app cab was arrested late on Friday on the charge of murdering Lakshmi Das, 45. He used to call her kaki (aunt), the police said.

Manna apparently admitted to the crime and told cops that he was left with no option but to kill Das who had been asking him to repay Rs 30,000 he had borrowed for her.

He told cops he could not repay the loan as he was unemployed during the lockdown and that he had existing bank loans for his three app cabs, the police said.

Manna’s wife Pinky told The Telegraph on Saturday that the family did not have money to return the multiple loans they had taken to buy three cars for an app cab business that stopped before taking off because of the lockdown.

“The (bank’s) recovery agents have been visiting us frequently as we have been unable to pay the EMIs for the three cars. My husband was under tremendous pressure. But I can’t imagine he would end up doing something like this,” she said.

On Friday, Manna, who lives at 4 Deshapran Sashmal Road, had picked up Lakshmi Das, 45, in his Maruti Alto at Mudiali in the afternoon when she stepped out of a flat where she works as a help. He offered to ferry her to the next destination.

“Lakshmi was seated in the rear. According to Manna’s statement, he got angry when she broached the subject of repayment. He said he took the car to Southern Avenue, turned off the ignition and tried to strangle her with bare hands… it was around 12.30pm,” an officer of the detective department’s homicide wing said.

“When he failed to overpower her, he pulled out a vegetable knife kept behind the driver’s seat and stabbed her on the neck multiple times in quick succession to ensure her death,” the officer said.

Manna is learnt to have told cops that he drove the car to the Bypass and parked it at a place, some distance from the Ruby crossing. All this time, the body had been on the rear seat, Manna has said.

After 6.30pm, Manna drove the car towards the interior of Anandapur and dumped the body in a bush behind a private hospital. He then cleaned the car and went to pick up a regular customer, a bank official from his office near the Exide crossing. He dropped him off at his home near Kamalgazai in Narendrapur like other day, the police said.

Das’s family lodged a missing diary with Tollygunge police station when she did not return home after 4.30pm and her phone was found switched off.

“We enquired in the neighbourhood and found that not just the woman, but a man (Manna), too, was not to be found since morning… his phone, too, was switched off. We suspected the two cases to be linked,” an officer of Tollygunge police station said.

The police found that Manna had made two phone calls to his sister and her husband in the afternoon, saying he had “committed a mistake”. Officers identified a location near Harish Park in Bhowanipore where Manna usually parked his car before returning home and started keeping a watch.

Around 11.30pm, Manna returned with the car and a team of officers in plain clothes detained him. During interrogation, he apparently admitted to the crime.

He guided a team of officers to the bushes where the body had been dumped, the police said.

It is still not clear whether he had picked up Das in the car with the intention to kill her or it was a spur-of-the-moment crime, the police said.