30-year-old man found murdered at Nerul

A 30-year-old man from Nerul was found murdered at sector 4 on Tuesday morning. A few locals spotted the corpse in an isolated spot and informed the police.

According to the police, the deceased, Amirul Gaji, a native of West Bengal, stayed with his family at sector 20 and ran an online lottery shop in Nerul. He had been missing since Monday morning. The culprits also took away his bike and gold ornaments worth Rs64,000 after committing the crime, a senior police officer said.

"While Gaji was taken to the Navi Mumbai Municipal Corporation hospital in Vashi, he was declared dead on arrival. Since the cause of Gaji's death was not clear initially, we registered an accidental death case. The postmortem reports later, however, revealed that he was strangled to death. It was only then that we registered a case of murder," said NG Majge, police inspector from Nerul police station.

The police are, however, still clueless about the motive behind the crime. "The deceased's wife, who works at a ladies' bar in Nerul, informed us that Gaji did not have any personal enmity with anyone in the neighbourhood. We are now interrogating many people based on suspicion, but have not found any evidence against them," another police officer said.

Meanwhile, the police have registered a case under sections 302 and 397 of the Indian Penal Code.

This, however, is not an isolated incident wherein someone has been found murdered at a deserted place in the city. More than 20 such bodies were found dumped at various isolated places in the city in 2013. Many of them are yet to be solved.