Police have arrested a youth and his friend after the former’s girlfriend missing since January 24 was found murdered at Waghoba Ghat in Maharashtra’s Palghar district on Thursday.
Carol Misquitta, a 28-year-old BPO staffer from the Mumbai suburb of Vile Parle (west), had left home around 10 pm on January 24 on her scooter to meet her boyfriend, Zico Misquitta, 27. Around 12.20am, Carol called her mother to say she would return home in some time. But as she didn’t return home, Carol’s mother complained to the Santacruz police the next day.
According to the police, between 3am and 4am, Carol and Zico got into an argument on the Mumbai-Ahmedabad highway in Palghar, after which he allegedly strangled and stabbed her with a knife. He is also alleged to have repeatedly hit her face with a rock to disfigure it.
The police said Zico had come to meet Carol with the knife, which was later found stuck in her chest during the postmortem. Zico and his friend Kumar Devendra, 30, then allegedly dumped her body around 15 feet from the road in the Waghobha Ghat area. They also hid her scooter in the bushes at another location before returning to Mumbai.
Ten days later, around 5.30pm on February 3, a person who went to pee near the bushes got the smell of a decomposed body and alerted the Palghar police.
The police said they had identified the body as Carol after checking the man-missing complaints filed in nearby districts. They checked CCTV footage from the road and narrowed down on Zico and Devendra.
“We arrested them for murder and produced them before a magistrate court, which remanded the duo in police custody till February 10,” said Nita Padvi, the subdivisional police officer investigating the case.
According to the police, Carol and Zico, who helped his father in his catering business, had been in a relationship since 2011.
Carol’s 56-year-old mother, a single parent, alleged that the Santacruz police hadn’t taken her complaint seriously. Anita Shetty, an activist and a family friend of Carol’s, alleged the police, despite being told Zico could be behind her disappearance, were apathetic.
“They kept saying that the girl had run away and would soon return home. From day one her mother was saying Zico is behind the crime, but the police did not believe her. In fact, Zico was acting like a good Samaritan showing sympathy to her family and misleading the police. The police questioned him multiple times but could not figure out that he was the culprit. One of the policemen also told her mother that they were busy with the inauguration of the Nirbhaya squad,” she told the Indian Express.
Shetty said a note scribbled by Carol about Zico had helped the police zero in on him.
“I have been working as an activist for past 30 years with the police. We also set up a Mahila Dakshita committee in Kurla after the Delhi gangrape, but now I feel like all this is useless. The police always give a stepmotherly treatment to man-missing complaints. In future, all such complaints need to be handled by the crime branch. There must at least be an experienced officer to handle such plaints. What family members want is to find their loved ones, dead or alive. There are so many missing cases which go undetected. I hope this incident will change the way missing complaints, especially of women, are treated by the Mumbai police,” she said.