Indian murder suspect caught after 49 years says: ‘I barely remember it’
- Sitaram Bhatane was 27 when he allegedly killed 70-year-old widow Mani Shukla; each year police went to his village hundreds of miles away, but he was never there
- Then, for an election this month, an inspector asked officers to round up various criminals, and they happened to find a limping, balding, hard-of-hearing Bhatane
An Indian policeman has apparently solved a murder case 49 years after the crime was committed because the alleged murderer made the mistake of returning to his village at the wrong time.
More than a decade before Inspector Pratipalsinh V. Gohil, 37, was even born, his predecessors at the Sardarnagar police station in Gujarat state began investigating the case of 70-year-old Mani Shukla, murdered in her house in the village of Saijpur in 1973. Officers say she fell during a scuffle and died.
The body of the vulnerable widow, who had no children or relatives and rented out rooms to earn money, lay for days before neighbours acted on the foul smell coming from the building.
Witnesses said a man named Sitaram Bhatane, 27, had killed her during a robbery. They said they had seen him enter the house on the day of the crime. Bhatane’s three brothers, who lived with him in the same neighbourhood as the victim, also said he had committed the murder and had been stealing beforehand.
But all efforts by police to find Bhatane failed for almost half a century. Every year, at different times, two officers visited Bhatane’s home village, Rajni, about 600km (372 miles) away in neighbouring Maharashtra state, to see if anyone there knew of his whereabouts.
When his brothers and nephew were around, they said they had not seen Bhatane or had word from him since the murder.