Body chopped, boiled, fed to dogs in Mumbai horror

A 32-year-old woman in suburban Mumbai was killed by her live-in partner of nine years who then used an electric saw to hack her body into so many parts that the police couldn’t pin a number.

- Megha Sood

For three days after the alleged murder, Manoj Sane, 56, tried to dispose of the body. In his frantic efforts to evade detection, he pressure-cooked some body parts, roasted others, and ground some more in a mixer and fed them to stray dogs.

When the police entered the sparsely decorated seventh-floor apartment at Geeta Akashdeep society, a middle-class enclave of 10 buildings on Mira Road, they found themselves in a veritable house of horror.

“The kitchen was a complete mess — there were buckets and multiple pots and pans full of chopped and minced human flesh,” said assistant police inspector Rahul Bhagvat who along with police inspector Jilani Sayyad was the first to enter the two-bedroom house. The two officers were sent there by the Nayanagar station house officer to investigate neighbours’ complaints of the stench emanating from flat number 704.

When they broke open the door, the first thing they saw in the house was a bloodied electric saw. In the kitchen, other than in the three buckets, the pressure cooker on the gas stove and the pan on the platform they also found human bones in the basin. Adding to the horror was a pair of chopped-off feet that sat on the platform.

On Wednesday night, the police arrested Sane for the murder of his live-in partner Saraswati Vaidya. The police say that Sane, who is employed at a kirana shop in the area, met Saraswati, who was orphaned, in 2014, and the two began living together. Sane, say the police, was sure that if he could dispose of Saraswati’s body in time, no one would ever come looking for her and he could escape undetected.