Solving Crime | Tailor tag on victim’s shirt helped Mumbai police crack musician’s murder – The Indian Express

Within four days, the Crime Branch of Mumbai Police detained two teenagers — the “adopted” minor daughter of the victim and her 16-year-old boyfriend — for the murder of a 59-year-old Santacruz-based musician, whose dismembered body was found stuffed in a suitcase at Mahim beach in December 2019. The minors were detained on December 7.

According to police, the girl was driven out of her home by her parents in 2017 and the victim Bennett Rebello, a guitarist, had allowed her to stay with him. The teenagers, in their statement to police, said they killed the man as he did not approve of their relationship and allegedly sexually abused the girl. Police said another motive for the murder was Rebello’s properties; however, the adoption papers were not in order.

The then DCP (Detection) Shahaji Umap had said the duo murdered Rebello by hitting him on the head with a stick on November 26, 2019, and for the next three-four days chopped his body and stuffed it in three bags at his Kalina, Santacruz residence, which they later threw in Mithi river.

As police probed the case, a suspicious bag washed ashore behind a dargah at Mahim. The white-and-silver colour stroller contained several limbs and private parts of a man wrapped in a black plastic bag. There were two shirts and three trousers in the suitcase. One of the shirts had a tailor tag ‘ALMO’s Men’s Wear’ attached on the collar. The clue led police to a tailor in Kurla (west). They found a cloth patch attached to a bill book that matched the shirt in the suitcase. However, the bill book only had the first name of the person.

A team led by API Mahendra Patil then searched the person on Facebook and, in one of the profiles, the display picture had a man in a maroon sweater, similar to the one found in the bag. The man had uploaded a photograph of a page with musical notes along with his signature, which matched that in the tailor’s bill book.

Police also found that the man, who would constantly post on Facebook, was inactive since November 25, 2019 and his mobile phone number, uploaded on the profile, had not been used since then.

A police team then went to the victim’s residence situated near Vakola mosque in Santacruz and detained the two teenagers. Later, police recovered a second bag, stuffed with mutilated body parts from Mithi river near Bandra Kurla Complex’s MTNL building. The third suitcase containing the victim’s head and torso was recovered the same month at Prabhadevi Chowpatty. In June last year, a sessions court granted bail to the third accused, Ghatkopar youth Ali Miya Chaus, arrested for allegedly helping the two minors to chop the body.

In May, this year, a children’s court observed that the two teenagers be tried as children in conflict with law (CCL) and not as adults. The court was told that the two were initially lodged at observation home and later granted bail as a reformative approach, after behavioural changes were seen in them.