Mira Road murder: 56-year-old man Googled how long it takes for body to rot

Officials carrying bags filled with the body parts of the victim

After cutting a body how many hours will it take for it to decompose and start smelling?" This is the question that the 56-year-old live-in partner, accused of killing his 32-year-old girlfriend, and chopping her body into multiple pieces, typed on an Internet search engine, on June 4.

Meanwhile, JJ Hospital, which is still in the midst of conducting the post-mortem, told the police that 10 per cent of the body parts are still missing. The police are awaiting postmortem of Serum Calcium (Ca) and Magnesium (Mg) report to check for the exact cause of death. This report will help them conclude if the deceased woman was poisoned or killed.

The accused has maintained that he has not killed the deceased. He told the police that he had found her lying unconscious and frothing from her mouth, in the drawing room of their flat in Mira road on Sunday. He claimed that she had died by suicide after consuming poison,. "We checked his mobile internet history and learnt that the accused had tried to find out how long it would take a body to decompose, after it was chopped into pieces," a police official told mid-day.

The accused allegedly completed the chopping of the body parts by Monday, and divided them into three buckets, and decided to destroy them, by dumping them near the railway tracks and also boiling them.

The Nayanagar Police has already started recording statements of the people connected with the accused and the deceased woman. In her statement to the police, one of the sisters of the deceased said that they were not too happy about their sister's decision to marry a man twice her age. "We asked her to leave him, but she refused."