Five bodies were dug out in Madhya Pradesh’s Dewas on Tuesday.

Dewas:

Bodies of five members of a family who had gone missing over a month ago were exhumed from a field in Madhya Pradesh’s Dewas district on Tuesday evening in Dewas. All five were strangled to death and were dumped in a 8 to 10 feet deep pit that was dug in advance. 
The police had to use an earth-mover to dig out the bodies.

45-year-old Mamta, her two daughters (21-year-old Rupali and 14-year-old Divya) and two teen cousins of the daughters had gone missing from their home in Dewas on May 13, the police said.

Their landlord, who was in a relationship with one of the victims, and a dozen of his accomplices are behind this horror, the police said. The main accused, Surendra Rajput, and four other suspects have been arrested. The police are looking for seven others.

When the cops dug eight feet under the ground, they found five decomposed bodies in separate graves. None of them had clothes. The accused had stripped them and burnt the clothes. The accused had covered the bodies with salt and urea to ensure they are decomposed.

“Six people, including Surendra Chouhan, have been arrested. While Chouhan planned and executed the murders, the five others helped him in digging the pits in which the victims were buried,” Dewas police officer Shiv Dayal Singh said.

The family had lodged a missing person complaint and efforts were on to trace them even as the killers tried to mislead the police by posting messages on social media sites through the ID of the woman’s elder daughter. The messages claimed that Rupali had got married according to her wishes and that her younger sister, two cousins and her mother were with her, and were safe.

The police tracked the mobile phone of Rupali and from her call details, realised that she was in constant touch with their home owner.

The home owner was questioned by the police but evaded questions over his relationship with the young woman. The police kept a watch on him and found that he was in constant touch with five others on May 13.

The five were separately questioned and the police managed to extract a lead that took the investigators to the field where the bodies had been buried.

Surendra Chouhan was known to the family and used to visit their home.  Though he was in a relationship with Rupali, he was planning to marry another woman. When Rupali got to know about it, she posted a picture of the man’s fiance on a social media site, along with her number. This enraged him. He then allegedly planned to eliminate Rupali and the others as he suspected that all of them were conspiring to break his engagement.