After misleading cops for days by providing false leads, Palande yesterday finally revealed where he had dumped the chopped body parts of Karan Kakkad, after which the head and an arm were recovered
Last week, murder accused Vijay Palande managed to slip out of the cops’ clutches, even after he was arrested. Even after his re-arrest, it appears that Palande has not abandoned his habit of bluffing the police. After systematically misleading the cops for three days, Palande finally revealed where he had dumped Karan Kakkad’s body, following which Amboli cops have recovered disembodied parts from the forests at Kumbharli Ghat in Chiplun.
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While his severed head and an arm have been recovered so far, the police are now looking for the remaining parts of the body with the help of the locals and fire brigade officers. Police officers explained that they had reason to believe that the other parts of his body would be strewn in the same area. Cops at the spot shared that Palande had chopped Kakkad’s body into several parts and stuffed them in two bags that they pinched from their victim’s house. They had then travelled all the way to Chiplun in Kakkad’s BMW and dumped the bags there.
Cops had expected to retrieve Kakkad’s body from his BMW, which they retrieved in Pune on Sunday. However, when the car yielded no such evidence, they immediately started interrogating Palande, who was accompanying them. Having withheld information for three days, Palande finally divulged the point at which he had dumped his victim’s body. Last evening, cops took Palande to the spot and recovered the fragments of Kakkad’s body. Himanshu Roy, joint commissioner of police (crime) said, “On March 5, Palande and his three accomplices had killed Kakkad in his flat, and butchered his body in the bathroom. They then wiped the bathroom clean to remove all telltale blood stains, stashed the body parts in the bags and then moved them into the BMW.”
Palande claimed that he had also planned to butcher Anuj Tiku in the same manner and subsequently dump the parts in the same spot. Yesterday, the police sent four teams to different locations — including Pune, Satara and Ratnagiri — to recover Kakkad’s body, on the basis of ‘information’ provided to them by Palande.“Palande is cunning, and knows how to mislead the police. We are therefore not relying on his statements entirely,” said a police officer from the Crime Branch.
On Sunday, cops had recovered Kakkad’s BMW car from a bungalow owned by Rahul Mane in Pune. The police officers said that Mane, who is a lawyer, had represented Palande in an earlier case. “We have not yet given a clean chit to Mane,” said an officer from Crime Branch. Meanwhile, the Amboli police found that there are as many as six leave and licence agreements registered in Palande’s name, two of which are under his alias as Karan Sood.u00a0