The Kandivli police filed a chargesheet against artist Chintan Upadhyay and four others in the much-discussed twin murders of his sculptor-wife Hema Upadhyay and her lawyer Harish Bhambani, in December last year.
While police named Chintan as the main accused in a 2,000 page chargesheet filed before a Borivili court on Friday, the four others named in the charge-sheet were: Vidyadhar Rajbhar, Pradeep Rajbhar, Shivkumar Rajbhar and Vijay Rajbhar. Of the accused, Vidyadhar is absconding.
In the charge-sheet, police listed 30 witnesses, including absconding accused Vidyadhar's mother who has allegedly named Chintan in her statement. Police also named Hema's servant lalit Mandal as one of the witnesses witnesses in the case.
With police having filed the charge-sheet before the Borivili metropolitan magistrate court, the magistrate there will soon commit the case to a sessions court where the trial will begin in the case in the coming weeks.
Hema (42) and Bhambani (65) were gagged to death allegedly by the aides of Vidyadhar at his warehouse at Kandivli on December 11. Two days later, the bodies of Hema and her lawyer Harsh were recovered from a drain at laljipada locality of Kandivli (west) in north Mumbai on December 13. Wrapped in plastic sheets, the two bodies were found packed in card board boxes and dumped in a drain.
Chintan and Hema, who were classmates at Baroda Faculty of Fine Arts, had married in 1998. After their relations went sour, the couple had filed for divource in a family court in 2010.
Chintan was arrested on December 22 last year on charges of conspiracy and murder. Chintan was booked under sections 302 (punishment for murder), 120 (B) (punishment for criminal conspiracy) and section 201 (causing disappearance of evidence of offence) of the Indian Penal Code. In the charge-sheet, police accused Chintan of having allegedly conspired with Vidyadhar and other accused in executing the murder of his wife Hema and that the motive behind the murder was the dispute over the divource between the couple and issues arising out of it.
Following an agreement arrived at between the feuding couple through the legal process, Chintan was supposed to make an initial Rs 4 lakh to Hema by December 11. Of which, he reportedly paid a sum of Rs 2 lakh by the stipulated date. The investigations have revealed that Chintan had not reconciled himself to a situation under which he would have to pay huge sums of alimony to his divourced wife.
The investigations that led to Chintan's arrest have revealed that he had allegedly met absconding accused Vidyadhar on two occasions in the run-up to the murder of Hema and her lawyer on December 11. One of the meetings that Chintan had with Vidyadhar was in the home city of Jaipur, where the two had allegedly hatched the conspiracy to bump off Hema.
The investigations have revealed that the ghastly crime was committed at Vidyadhar's warehouse at Kandivli, where Hema had come along with her lawyer Bhambani on the evening of December 11 to strike a deal with the absconding accused.
Sadhu Rajbhar and other perpetrators used kerchief soaked in chloroform which was readily available at the warehouse to render the two unconscious. later, they allegedly tied the two and gagged them to death on the same night.
The investigators attributed the presence of chloroform at the warehouse to the fact that Rajbhars would use this chemical to clean the moulds of fabricated installations they would make for Hema and her husband Chintan. After killing Hema and her lawyer Bhambani, the perpetrators used card boxes available at the warehouse to pack the two bodies and transported them in a tempo. The boxes were dumped into an open drain in laljipada locality at Kandivli (west) in north Mumbai.