Dewas: A woman's body was found stuffed in a refrigerator on Friday in Dewas district of Madhya Pradesh about 10 months after her live-in partner had allegedly murdered her.
The accused allegedly strangled the victim to death after she pressured him to get married, a police official said. The body was found in the house located in Vrindavan Dham Colony under BNP (Bank Note Press) police station limits.
A current tenant in the house, according to police, opened a locked room to clean it and, to his shock, found the body in the refrigerator. The accused Sanjay Patidar, a resident of Ujjain district, was arrested soon after the police launched an investigation into the case.
Giving details of the crime, Superintendent of Police (SP), Dewas Puneet Gehlot said they received information that a woman's body was found in a refrigerator in Vrindavan Dham Colony.
Acting on it, the police team immediately reached the incident site. The house, he said, belongs to one Dhirendra Srivastava, who currently resides in Indore and he had rented it to a person named Balbir Rajput.
According to the SP, Rajput has been residing in the house for a long time. "Two rooms of the house were locked by previous tenants. Balbir Rajput opened those rooms to clean them. On Friday morning, when he opened the refrigerator, he found the body of the woman in it. Following which, Rajput immediately informed the police," the SP said.
As police began questioning the neighbours, they came to know that before Rajput, a person named Sanjay Patidar, a resident of Ujjain, had rented the house. "A woman named Pratibha alias Pinky Prajapati was residing with him (Patidar) in that house. According to the neighbours, no one had seen that woman since March 2024. Sanjay Patidar had then told the neighbours that the woman had gone to her maternal house," SP Gehlot said.
"Based on these initial facts, a team was formed to take Sanjay Patidar into police custody. On Friday noon, the police took Patidar into custody. In the primary interrogation, the accused confessed to the crime. He told the police that he had been living in a live-in relationship with Pratibha for the last five years. Patidar is a resident of Ujjain and he was with the woman in Ujjain for nearly three years. After that, he rented a house in Dewas and was living here," the SP added.
BNP police station inspector Amit Solanki said Patidar used to visit the house once in a while. "The current tenant asked the landlord to unlock this portion of the house. The landlord showed this portion of the house to the tenant but then locked it again, since Patidar's belongings were inside, and switched off power supply on Wednesday (Jan 8, 2025)," inspector Solanki said.
The refrigerator stopped working after the electricity was switched off and a foul smell started emanating from that portion of the house, he added.
In the preliminary interrogation, the accused told the police that at the beginning of 2024, the woman was constantly pressuring him for marriage. "As a result of it, the accused Patidar called one of his associates Vinod Dave, who is also a resident of Ujjain and both strangled the woman to death in March 2024. To conceal the crime, the accused kept the body in the refrigerator of the house. He tied the refrigerator with a cloth, covered it properly and then locked the room," the SP said.
The police arrested the accused Patidar. The second accused Vinod Dave is currently in jail in Rajasthan in a crime case at Kotwali police station in Tonk district. Dewas police are in the process of contacting the Rajasthan Police.
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