Voting ink on victim’s finger helps Mumbai police solve murder case

The victim's face had been smashed with stone and other than the voting ink mark, the only other identification marks were tattoos on his body, a cross and the alphabets B and K on his hand

Voting ink on victim's finger helps Mumbai police solve murder case

Representational image

The indelible ink voting mark on the finger of a murder victim helped Mumbai Police identify the man to solve the case. The victim identified as Kiran Wankhede was found near a public toilet on the Ghatkopar-Mankhurd Link Road in the first week of May. His face had been smashed with stone and other than the voting ink mark, the only other identification marks were tattoos on his body, a ‘holy cross’ and the alphabets B and K on his hand.

According to Indian Express, the post-mortem reports confirmed that his head had been smashed with stone and Deonar police registered a case of murder against unidentified persons. During the investigation, the police arrested two persons identified as Niyaz Choudhary (20) and Shafiullah Qureshi (23). Police stated that duo were drug addicts and they confessed that they wanted money so when they saw a man in the area they thought of robbing him, When the victim started fighting with them, the duo allegedly smashed his head and fled the scene.

The Deonar police found themselves arresting the killers but couldn't identify who the victim was. According to the police, the accused stated that they randomly attacked the victim and did not know his identity. The police then put up posters with the photograph of the deceased in the Shivaji Nagar-Deonar area and also got it published on local TV channels, but no one came forward. “All we were left with was the voting mark, a cross and the initials BK on his body,” said a police officer.

The police later suspected that he was a local resident as he was walking in the area during the time of the attack and the voting mark indicated that his name would be on the voters’ list. Senior inspector P Darade asked Assistant Police Inspector Mohan Sarode and Police Sub-Inspector V Babar to form separate teams and start investigating the voters’ list from the Assembly segment comprising Shivaji Nagar and Deonar.

“The voters’ list contained 3.5 lakh names. A team of 12 policemen sat in the detection room and divided the 3.5 lakh voters. They then removed the names of women, men over 40 and Muslim men. The post-mortem report said the deceased had not been circumcised, therefore establishing him as a non-Muslim. They also compared the photograph on the voters’ list to that of the partly damaged face of the deceased,” said DCP ( zone 6) Shashi Meena.

The police also looked for people with names beginning with K or B and someone who may have converted to Christianity since there was a cross on the hand. “After applying these filters, we got around 125 men,” Babar stated. Fortunately, the police stumbled upon the name 'Kiran Wankhede'. When a team reached his residence in Mankhurd, his mother Kantabai Wankhede (50) informed he had been missing for several days. “When we showed her the photograph, she started crying. She said it was her son’s body,” Sarode said.

While the police were convinced she was the mother of the deceased, they investigated further about the two tattoos. “His mother told us that his friends had been getting cross tattoos on their hands, so he got it too. As for the B K initials, while K was for his name, B was the initial of a former girlfriend that he had not bothered to get removed," Sarode added.

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