In a gloomy reminder of Robinson Street incident the Kolkata Police on Thursday detained a middle-aged person for preserving his mother’s corpse for almost three years after she died of old-age related ailments in 2015.
Police recovered the body of Bina Majumdar 84-year-old woman who died in a hospital in 2015 of multiple organ failure. She was subsequently preserved in a commercial refrigerator used for storing ice creams by her son Subhabrata Majumdar a leather technology graduate and his father after presumably removing her intestines, police said.
Both Bina and Gopal Majumdar her husband were retired employees of the Food Corporation of India. Though the duo would not disclose the reasons behind preserving the corpse of the deceased, a senior police officer said Subhabrata had conceded to have used his mother’s pension account for financial gains.
“It seems that the man regularly withdrew cash with a debit card from his mother’s pension account,” the senior officer. When asked as to how he could procure the live Certificate from the bank the police pointed to traces of black ink on the dead woman’s thumbs suggesting “the certificate was obtained through forgery.”
Police also found containers full of chemicals purported used to prevent decay of the body source said. “We have detained them and are investigating the case. The body has been sent for postmortem,” police said.
Apart from “wrongful financial gain” angle the police are also looking into whether the father who seemed mentally deranged had prevailed upon the son to preserve the body convincing him that she could be brought back to life.
A similar incident had happened at Robinson Street in up market Kolkata a couple of years ago when a man called Partho Dey had preserved his dead sister’s body and lived with the corpse for months before being arrested and found mentally unbalanced. Dey a highly educated person subsequently committed suicide.