Having grilled him intensely for more than a week and landed evidence linking him to the twin murders of his sculptor-wife Hema Upadhyay and her lawyer Harish Bhambani, the Kandivli police arrested artist Chintan Upadhyay in early hours of Tuesday on charges of conspiracy and murder.
The crime branch sleuths of the Kandivli police took Chintan into custody at 3,30 am, after questioning him for more than five hours.
43-year-old Chintan was produced before a suburban Magistrate’s court at Borivli, which remanded him in police custody till January 1.
Chintan has been 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.
With Chintan’s arrest, the total number of arrests in the twin murders of Hema and her lawyer Bhambani has gone up to five. The investigators are on the look-out for the key absconding accused Vidyadhar Rajbhar, who had allegedly carried out – through his aides – the elimination of Hema and Bhambani, at the behest of Chintan.
Contrary to the initial findings in the investigations when the arrested accused had told the police that a financial dispute between the slain sculptor and Vidyadhar had forced them to execute the sensational double murder, the investigators have found that the issues relating to the divorce between Chintan and Hema and the quantum of alimony arising out of it had prompted the former to “order” allegedly the killing of his wife and her lawyer.
In its application seeking the remand of Chintan, the police informed the court that he had 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. “We have established the alleged role of the arrested accused (Chintan) in the murder of his wife Hema and her lawyer from the arrested accused and witnesses in the case,” the police stated in their remand application.
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. The couple had filed for divource in a family court in 2010.
After the divource came through sometime in 2014, Hema had moved the Bombay HC challenging the divorce granted by the family court. She had simultaneously moved the family court seeking alimony.
Following an agreement arrived at between the feuding couple through the legal process, Chintan was supposed to make an initial `4 lakh to Hema by December 11. Of which, he reportedly paid a sum of `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.
Though they arrested four accused -- Vijay Rajbhar, Pradeep Rajbhar and Azad Rajbhar – within a week of the crime and launched a manhunt of the absconding Vidyadhar over a purported financial dispute, the investigators had not let Hema’s estranged husband Chintan off the hook. In fact, the investigators questioned Chintan for at least six days since the recovery of the bodies of his wife and her lawyers to establish his role and the motive behind the crime.
The investigators’ move to subject Chintan to prolonged questioning stemmed from the fact that they were in no mood to buy the theory put out by Rajbhars that it was a dispute involving a sum of Rs 5 lakh that Hema had with Vidyadhar’s firm that had prompted the absconding accused to order the killing of the high-profile sculptor and her lawyer Harish.
The investigations that led to the arrest of Chintan 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.
Ahead of the murder, Vidhyadar had allegedly called Hema and claimed that he had evidence against Chintan which she could use legally and wanted to part with her the “evidence” for a price.
The 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.