Medical representative murder case cracked; property dispute was motive

AYODHYA: Twenty-four hours after the charred body of a medical representative was found 150m off his residence in Cantonment area of Faizabad, police cracked the case and nabbed the kingpin and three other accused. The murder weapon was also seized and cops attributed the motive to a protracted property dispute with a neighbour.
The medical representative, Atul Khare, 54, who went missing since late Monday, stayed alone in his Faizabad residence while his family lived in Lucknow.His daughter Charu had begun a #JusticeforAtulKhare campaign on social media to bring the killers to book.
Faizabad circle officer (City) Arvind Chaurasiya, who swiftly worked out the case, told TOI that police searched the house of the deceased and the locked residence of a neighbour adjoining a vacant plot, while tracking Khare’s movements, hours before his murder.
His neighbour, Aditya alias Shanu, 33, would park his car in the vacant plot sandwiched between the two houses and claim the land as his own. Khare, however, would say he possessed land documents to buttress his claim and the dispute lingered for years.
“On Monday evening, while Shanu and his two friends, Rahul Rawat, 19, Ramjit Rawat, 42, and Brijpal Maurya, 30, were consuming liquor, Khare barged into their house and objected to the car parked on the vacant plot. This sparked a verbal spat and Shanu smashed Khare’s head with an empty liquor bottle. When Khare collapsed, they tried to wipe out blood stains and carried the body to a desolate place, doused it with petrol and set it ablaze,” said Chaurasiya. Blood clots on the floor of Shanu’s house and broken liquor bottles in the crime scene gave vital clues which led to the arrest, he said.