Pune: The Pimpri Chinchwad police are searching for an autorickshaw driver on the charge of strangling his live-in partner to death inside his room at Adarshnagar in Kalewadi in the early hours of Wednesday.
The suspect kept the 26-year-old woman’s body in the autorickshaw and covered it with a bedsheet. He then parked the vehicle near the house of the victim’s mother at Samrat Colony in Thergaon and fled, the police said.
“The murder came to light around 8am when a passerby noticed the victim lying in the backseat of the autorickshaw.He alerted the police control room about the unconscious woman,” senior inspector N B Kolhatkar of the Wakad police said.
He said the police took the woman to a hospital, where doctors declared her dead. “The woman was strangled either with a rope or a piece of cloth,” he said.
The officer said the owner of the autorickshaw was traced with the help of its registration number. “The suspect was driving his autorickshaw for the past few years. After identifying the driver, the deceased woman’s name was ascertained. The victim’s mother also identified her,” he said.
Kolhatkar said investigations revealed that the woman was in a live-in relationship with the driver, who was already married. “The woman’s husband died in 2018. She is survived by a six-year-old son from her first marriage,” he said.
He said the police got the information that the autorickshaw driver and the woman had gone to the former’s room at Adarshnagar in Kalewadi on Tuesday midnight. “They might have had some heated arguments over some issue, which led to the woman’s murder,” Kolhatkar said.
He said the suspect took the body to Thergaon before 3am and fled. “We have fanned a team to trace him,” Kolhatkar said.
