Bhubaneswar: More than three weeks after a woman was found murdered in Mahavir slum at Bharatpur on the city outskirts, the Commissionerate Police arrested the accused from Nayagarh district on Thursday.
Bhubaneswar DCP Umashankar Das told the media that the accused, Sheikh Farid, was arrested while he was trying to flee to Kandhamal district.
The DCP said the accused is a native of Medinipur in West Bengal, but had been living in Odisha with his family since 2001. While staying in Cuttack, he had changed his name to Kartik Jena and worked as a mason.
During this time, he came in contact with one Sandhyarani Sethi. Soon, he started an affair with Sandhyarani without his wife’s knowledge. Later, he took her to Bhubaneswar and stayed with her in a rented house in Mahavir slum. But as Sandhyarani came to know that he has a wife, there was a quarrel between them.
On the night of September 3, the accused strangulated Sandhayarani with her scarf and fled the house by locking the front door.
At first, the accused went to Kolkata. When the Commissionerate Police got to know about his whereabouts, a team went there to arrest him. But he managed to give police the slip. Later, the police found his location in Nayagarh district after tracking his mobile phone.
The accused, who was hiding inside a forest in Nayagarh for some days, tried to flee to Kandhamal but was arrested, the DCP said.
He stated that the accused has been brought to Bhubaneswar and police will forward him to a court later in the day after interrogation.
