A 32-year-old man has confessed to the beheading murder of a woman whose body was found without hands in a drain in Noida last week. The man, who is married, was arrested on Friday, and said he had killed the victim, with whom he was in a relationship, for multiple reasons, including that she was pressuring him to leave his wife and get married to her and asking for money she had loaned to him.
Police identified the suspect as Monu Solanki, who hails from Etah. He is a resident of Barola in Sector 49, where he lives with his wife and three children. Police narrowed down on him as a suspect by combing through CCTV footage from the areawhere the body was found and tracking down the vehicles in the area at the time when the body was dumped, which led them to Solanki. He works as a bus driver attached to a religious institution.
The victim has been identified as Preeti, 32, from West Bengal, who had been living in Noida since 2023 with her two children, a 5-year-old daughter and an 8-year-old son. The victim and Solanki were neighbours, living just 500m from each other.
Solanki was arrested from Barola, Noida. During questioning, hetold police that hefelt “stuck” between his wife and the victim, and he had slipped into depression. “Now, I am sleeping well,” the suspect said, adding that he felt “no remorse”.
He was produced before the court on Friday, and later sent to jail.
On November 6, the victim’s body was found floating in a drain next to an open ground of an upscale high-rise and Sector 108 park, along the Noida-Greater Noida Expressway. She was not wearing clothes, and also had her hands chopped off from the wrists. Apart from some toe rings, after a search of an area, police did not recover anything that could have been used to immediately identify her.
At least 40 teams were formed to crack the case and sent to Delhi, Western UP, and other surrounding districts to check missing persons complaints for women, said Rajeev Narayan Mishra, additional deputy commissioner of police, Gautam Budh Nagar (law and order).
To zero in on the suspect, police scanned CCTV footage from the area where the body was dumped. “We scanned nearly 55,000 vehicles using around 5,000 CCTV cameras from the period of 9 pm to 5 am, which entered into the district from all border areas. Later, we came down to hundreds of vehicles which visited in the vicinity of the spot and 44 vehicles were zeroed in at last,” said Mishra.
“After contacting each vehicle owner’s drivers, a bus which visited the spot had become the point of our investigation.”
Initially, Mishra said, when Solanki was contacted, he tried to mislead the police. But they later learnt of his relationship with a next-door neighbour who had gone missing.
The police then visited the children of the missing woman and shared photos of the toe rings with them. They confirmed the rings belonged to their mother, confirming the victim’s identity. “Later, his location was found in Barola late Thursday night and he was picked up for questioning,” added Mishra.
Solanki told police that he met the victim, who used to work at a cloth manufacturing factory with Solanki’s mother, around two-and-a-half years ago.
An officer who a part of the investigation, on condition of anonymity, said, “Solanki revealed that he was stuck between his wife (who knew about his extramarital affair) and the deceased woman, who was pressuring him to marry. To escape from the situation, he decided to kill her.”
According to the chronology that Solanki shared with the police,Noida deputy commissioner of police Yamuna Prasad said that on November 5, at 3pm, Solanki, with the intention of killing the victim, asked to come out with him. Around 8:30pm, after spending several hours together and visiting a number of places, they reached close to the site where the body was dumped.
He had brought with him a butcher’s knife that he had taken from her kitchen and, as they were eating, they got into a fight over past issues. Solanki then used the knife, hidden under a seat, to try and cut off her neck. She subsequently collapsed, and Solanki beheaded her. He then cut off her hands because he feared her fingerprints would help police identify her.
DCP Prasad said, he later also removed all marks on her body that would help identify her. He dumped her body in the drain and left for Ghaziabad’s Siddharth Vihar, where he crushed her remains under the bus before dumping them to nearby railway tracks.
The Noida police recovered the decomposed body parts, clothes, and weapon from the railway tracks after his arrest on Friday.
The officer, who was cited above, said, “After killing her, he did not return home. Since he used to be away from home for two to three days for work, his wife did not suspect anything unusual. The deceased woman’s children who used to visit Solanki’s home were staying with his wife and kids on some days and also in another neighbour’s home. No missing complaint was filed as well.”
Expanding on his motives, the officer said, “Solanki’s wife already knew that he was in an extramarital affair with the woman and was pressurising him to leave her. On the other hand, the victim was also pressing him to get married to her and return of around ₹2 lakh which she had loaned him. She had also threatened that she would engage his two daughters in flesh trade in future.”
Solanki also suspected she was in a relationship with someone else, the officer added.
Solanki allegedly cleaned the bus multiple times to remove blood stains. A forensic analysis found human blood from the bus and it has been seized as well. A case under section 103(1) (murder) and 238 (causing disappearance of evidence) of Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) has been registered at Sector 39 police station.