Woman plots husband’s murder, hears his dying shrieks on phone
KOLKATA: The macabre love story of Manua Majumdar, who scripted her husband’s cold blooded murder with the help of her lover, has shocked West Bengal.
On May 3, Manua, a 28-yearold casual staffer at Barasat municipality, left work early to meet her boyfriend Ajit Roy, 26, at her house. The two knew each other since college.
In the same house, Ajit would later brutally murder Manua’s husband, Anupam Sinha, 34, a manager at a travel agency. The two had been married for a year.
Ajit hit Anupam on the head with an iron rod, then slashed his veins with a knife to finish him off. But before that he shoved the rod in Sinha’s mouth and dialled Manua so she could hear his dying shrieks over the phone. Initially, she had planned to be present during the murder.
After Anupam was dead, Ajit cleaned up the apartment. The next morning, he took a dip in the Ganges in Kolkata after throwing his clothes and Anupam’s cell phone in the river.
The police first suspected foul play when they found Anupam’s gold ring near his body — a professional criminal would not have taken off the ring from the victim’s finger and leave it at the crime scene.
Ajit reportedly told the police that Manua had given the ring to Anupam on their first anniversary a few months ago and he did not want to see it on Sinha’s finger anymore.
“Initially, we thought it was another extra-marital affair gone wrong. We see many such crimes these days,” said a police officer handling the probe. “But this case is a shocker for us.”
Police arrested Manua and her paramour two weeks after Anupam, a Bangladeshi national settled in Kolkata, was found murdered in his home in Barasat’s Hridaypur area.
On Saturday, when she was produced before a court, the crowd shouted slogans and even assaulted her lawyer for trying to defend her in court.
“I probed numerous murder cases but this one stands out,” said Samir Ganguly, retired Kolkata Police deputy commissioner who headed the homicide section for many years.
Apparently, Anupam had discovered Manua’s relationship with Ajit and the couple used to fight over it.
“He never elaborated but would often regret his marriage. I shouldn’t have married her, he would say,” Abhisek Chatterjee, a colleague of Anupam, told the media .
Incidentally, Ajit, too, was married once and his former wife told the police that he used to torture her physically.
What has shocked Kolkata residents is Manua’s cool demeanour during the probe. On Saturday, when hundreds were jostling to have a look at her and abusing her, she quietly wondered what the fuss was all about. NEW DELHI: RJD strongman Mohammad Shahabuddin was taken into custody by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which last week named him as an accused in the murder of journalist Rajdeo Ranjan of Hindi national daily Hindustan.
Shahabuddin, who has around 40 criminal cases against his name, was lodged in Delhi’s Tihar jail from where he was taken to the Lodhi Road headquarters of the CBI for questioning. A CBI court in Muzaffarpur (Bihar) granted eight-day police custody of Shahabuddin and agency officials said the former Siwan MP will be kept at their headquarters.
Elaborating on the case , CBI spokesperson RK Gaur said that Shahabuddin’s custody was sought after “certain oral, documentary and circumstantial evidences” emerged during investigation of Ranjan’s murder.
Ranjan, chief of Hindi Daily’s Siwan bureau, was shot dead by unknown assailants when he left his office on the evening of May 13, 2016. Local police had then arrested six people in the case and later chargesheeted them. However, slain journalist’s widow Asha Ranjan and his father Radhe Krishna Chaudhary alleged that Shahabuddinwas behind the murder. The family said that Ranjan had become a threat to the Siwan MP after his reportage on deteriorating law and order situaion in Shahabuddin’s former constituency.