Twitter
Advertisement

Two more bodies found in Goa creek, tally goes up to 10

Four bodies were found on Wednesday alone, prompting the state government to set up two special investigating teams (SITs) to probe the deaths.

Latest News
article-main
FacebookTwitterWhatsappLinkedin

Ten bodies, including those of six women and two children, have been discovered in different parts of Goa over the past three days, raising fears of serial killings in the coastal state. Bodies of four of the victims were either partially burnt or disfigured, apparently to destroy evidence, the police said.

Four bodies were found on Wednesday alone, prompting the state government to set up two special investigating teams (SITs) to probe the deaths, at least four of which are believed to be murders.

“We are trying to get to the root cause of the incidents,” chief minister Digamber Kamat told reporters. “We want to assure citizens that Goa is one of the safest places in the country.”

Goa rolls out the red carpet to around 24 lakh tourists, including four lakh foreigners, every year. The suspected killings have come almost six months after the arrest of ‘dupatta murderer’ Mahanand Naik, a rickshaw driver who confessed to having strangled 16 women over 15 years.

Superintendent of police Atmaram Deshpande said the bodies of a boy  of 7 and a girl of 4 were recovered from a creek running across Panaji  on Wednesday evening. The police had recovered two bodies — that of a woman of 35 and a man of 50 — from the same creek in the morning. Deshpande said that all four victims may be related as they were found on the same day and at the same place.

The bodies started surfacing on Monday, when a woman and a man were found dead at Chopdem, close to North Goa’s Morjim. The body of a 61-year-old woman, Conceicao D’Souza, was found at Merces, near the capital city of Panaji, later in the day. On Tuesday, a partially-burnt body of an unidentified woman was found at Khorjuem near Mapusa.  

The police discovered two more bodies later that evening — that of 16-year-old Evita Rodrigues at Verna village on the Panaji-Margao national highway and an unidentified woman at Succor in Porvorim, a few kilometres from Panaji.

Evita, a resident of Taleigao in suburban Panaji, was missing since Sunday. While Evita’s body was partially burnt, the face of the other woman was smashed with a stone. “We found a stone near the body at Succor with bloodstains on it,” Deshpande told reporters.

He said of the 10 deaths, four involving women — three partially burnt and with faces smashed — were suspected murders. Conceicao died of “smothering” and Evita of “ligature strangulation”, Deshpande said. The autopsy has revealed that the burn injuries were inflicted “after death”.

“The motive could have been to destroy evidence,” he said. About the possibility of a serial killer’s involvement in the killings, director-general of police BS Bassi said: “It is still too early to say. All options are open.”

He refused to admit similarities between the latest deaths with the alleged serial killings by Mahanand Naik. “Mahanand’s case was a classic failure of the system. The whole system had collapsed. We have learnt our lessons,” he said.

Bassi said nearly 18 persons were reported missing in Goa over the last fortnight.
Questions have been raised about the safety of tourists, especially women, in Goa after the rape and murder of British teenager Scarlett Keeling, whose semi-nude body was recovered from Anjuna beach in February last year.

A Russian teenager, Elena Sukhonova, died under mysterious circumstances in the state earlier this year.

— With inputs from agencies



Find your daily dose of news & explainers in your WhatsApp. Stay updated, Stay informed-  Follow DNA on WhatsApp.
Advertisement

Live tv

Advertisement
Advertisement