Man arrested for throttling elderly relative to death and robbing jewellery

Pune: The North Mahalunge MIDC police on Saturday arrested a 36-year-old man from Karanjvihire village in Khed taluka on the charge of throttling his 80-year-old distant relative to death and robbing her of gold jewellery worth Rs 25,000.The murder happened around 8pm 8 pm on May 2, near the woman's house at Karanjvihire. The accused had stuffed Sindhubai Margaj's body into a plastic gunny bag and threw it in the Bham river. Senior police inspectror inspector Digambar Suryavanshi of the North Mahalunge MIDC police told TOI the accused was arrested on a tip-off from a jeweller. The accused, Kailas Margaj, had sold the elderly woman's jewellery to him."When the woman's grandson went to the jeweller to check whether the latter knew about the missing woman or her jewellery. , The the jeweller became suspicious and alerted us about the accused. He also told us that Margaj had come to his shop on May 3 and sold the jewellery by claiming that he had found it somewhere," Suryavanshi said.The officer said that the woman's grandson on May 5 had lodged a missing person's complaint. "Our team was searching for the woman. After receiving an alert from the jeweller, we recovered the robbed jewellery and took Margaj into custody," the officer said.Police sub-inspector Sachin Mahadik of the North Mahalunge MIDC police said that the accused, Margaj, is a daily wage worker. On the night of May 2, he first throttled the woman to death and then removed her jewellery. He then kept the body into in a plastic gunny bag and threw it in the river from a bridge on the road between Dhamane and Karanjvihire road . "We recovered the highly decomposed body on May 7, about 300 meters metres away from the spot. The accused has been remanded to police custody till May 12," Mahadik said.eom\mt