Deutsche Tageszeitung - Suspect Arrested in Manipur After Body Found on Tamil Nadu Express

Tambaram City Police have arrested a 22-year-old man from Assam in connection with the killing of a woman in Guduvanchery whose decomposed, dismembered remains were discovered inside luggage on the Chennai-New Delhi Tamil Nadu Express. M. Manik Uddin Laskar was located at Kashimpur in Manipur’s Jiribam district.

Laskar, a resident of Dakshin Krishnapur in the Sonabarighat area of Assam’s Cachar district, will be taken to Tambaram after officers secure a transit warrant. Police said questioning him would be necessary before they could establish a motive.

The case began on August 5, when staff found human remains inside a red trolley bag in the rear general compartment of the train at Agra railway station at about 5 a.m. The body was decomposed and the head was missing. Agra Railway Police registered a case and began tracing the bag’s route.

After the Agra force contacted authorities in Chennai, Government Railway Police at Chennai Central and the Railway Protection Force reviewed footage from Platform 4. Video showed a man and woman carrying a suspicious trolley bag onto the Tamil Nadu Express before it departed for Delhi at around 10 p.m. on August 3.

Investigators followed the pair through additional surveillance recordings, matching luggage of a similar color and tracing their movements to Guduvanchery. Their inquiries led to a rented house on Masuthi Street, where police said the couple had stayed with another woman.

The victim was identified as Hayathun Nisha, 38, the wife of Jahhur Khan and a native of Jagatsinghpur in Odisha. She had been living in Guduvanchery and was employed by a private company.

Police identified the missing couple as Laskar and Bhagabati Majhi of Odisha. During a search of the rented property, officers recovered additional body parts from a cooking vessel. That evidence strengthened their suspicion that the killing and dismemberment took place at or was connected to the house.

Tambaram City Police Commissioner Prem Anand Sinha created a special team and supervised the search. An officer said investigators traveled to an isolated area of Manipur, where rain and difficult access limited their movement during daylight hours. They remained there for more than a week, monitored Laskar’s movements and eventually arrested him.

Majhi remained at large, and police were continuing efforts to locate her. Authorities had not yet given a definitive account of the killing, the reason the remains were placed on the train or the location of the victim’s missing head. Those questions were expected to form part of the interrogation after Laskar’s transfer to Tamil Nadu.

(L.Møller--DTZ)