The body of an unidentified woman was found in a black storage bag a dumping yard in Noida’s Sector 145, police on Sunday, adding that her hands and legs had been bound and it appeared that acid had been used to burn her face to conceal her identity.
However, the woman has no fatal injuries and police have yet to ascertain how she died and if it was a murder.
The body was found on Saturday by ragpickers who spotted the black bag at the yard. They alerted the police around 6:30 pm,” said Santosh Kumar, additional deputy commissioner of police (ADCP) (central Noida).
According to a preliminary investigation, the woman appears to be in the early 20s. She was wearing black pants but nothing on top. However, there was no sign of sexual assault, said officials requesting anonymity.
Her hands and legs were all bound together with a white piece of cloth and her face was burnt, said a senior police officer, requesting anonymity, adding that it appeared that acid was used to burn her face. This will only be confirmed after the autopsy report.
“It is suspected that her face was disfigured to conceal her identity,” said the official cited above.
The woman’s were swollen and she also had cut marks, though superficial, on her neck. There were no other injuries on her body.
Since she did not have any possessions or identity cards, police have yet to identify the woman. Three teams have been formed to scan CCTV footage in the area and across dumping yards in Gautam Budh Nagar district to ascertain where the body has come from. The sector 145 dump yard is the largest in the district and waste from all other dump yards is dropped off there.
“There was no CCTV camera installed at the spot. To check whether the woman was dumped at the Sector 142 yard or transported with garbage from somewhere else, we are scanning CCTV cameras and checking all dumping yards in the district,” said the ADCP.
The body has been sent to a postmortem house to help establish the exact cause of death. However, the examination will only be conducted after a 72-hour wait for identification.
For now, details of her appearance and photograph of her have been circulated to all police stations in the district and surrounding areas to help identify her. Several teams have been formed to investigate the missing persons complaints for women between the ages of 15 and 18. The teams have also been sent to surrounding districts.
According to Sector 142 station house officer Vinod Kumar, “A case will be registered after receiving the autopsy report, which will reveal the cause of death.”