3 more held in double murder case

Police still looking for main suspect and another person whom they haven’t named ‘KEY SUSPECT LAST TRACED TO JALGAON’

MUMBAI: At 2.55am on Tuesday morning, the Mumbai police arrested three more people — two warehouse workers and a tempo driver — for the murders of artist Hema Upadhyay, 43, and her lawyer Haresh Bhambani, 65, taking the number of people arrested in the case to four. The police are still looking for their employer Vidhyadhar Rajbhar, the main suspect, and a sixth person whose identity they are keeping under wraps for now.

“Three more suspects — Vijaykumar Rajbhar, Pradipkumar Rajbhar and Azad Rajbhar — were arrested on Tuesday,” said Fateh Singh Patil, additional commissioner of police, north region. The three were produced in the Borivli metropolitan court around 12.30pm, their faces Vidhyadhar Rajbhar, the main suspect in the murders of artist Hema Upadhyay (left) and Haresh Bhambani, remains at large. According to a police source, Vidhyadhar was last traced to Jalgaon district through his cell phone location. He was on a train to UP, but got down at Jalgaon, where he switched off his mobile phone.

covered with black sheaths. The court remanded them in police custody until December 19.

Vijaykumar, a tempo driver, would regularly transport paintings and scrap from Vidhyadhar’s warehouse, where Hema and Chintan stored their artworks, while Pradipkumar 22, and Azad, 19, were employees at the warehouse. Pradipkumar had been working there for one and-a-half years and Azad for six months. Both had been brought to the city by Vidhyadhar, a source said.

Officials said Vijaykumar approached the police himself after reading about the crime in the next day’s papers. He told the police he did not know what was in the boxes — later found to contain the bodies of Hema and Bhambani — when he disposed them in a drain in Kandivli.