Pallavi Purkayastha murder: How disguise, and a FB post helped nab killer who jumped parole

On August 9, 2012, Mughal, a security guard at the building where Purkayastha lived, cut off electricity supply to her flat and entered the same on the pretext of fixing it. He allegedly raped her, and stabbed her 16 times, causing her death.

Mughal was arrested at the Mumbai Central Railway terminus the evening after Purkayastha’s body was found, before he could leave for Surat from where he planned to flee to J&K.

In July 2014, a sessions court in Mumbai sentenced Mughal alias Sajjad Pathan to life imprisonment. In January 2016, he was given a one-month parole to meet his sick mother but he never came back.

Pallavi Purkayastha was murdered on On August 9, 2012. (File)

In October 2017, he was arrested near Srinagar by a team led by Inspector Nikam. Mughal had moved to Kashmir assuming it would be easy for him to avoid being caught. Later, he posted a photograph with his brother on Facebook. While Mughal used various numbers to evade arrest, he failed to de-link his old mobile number from Facebook and the photograph revealed his location at Uri, a town near Line of Control (LoC). This helped the cops narrow down on the area to find him.

By the time the police team went to Uri, Mughal had moved to his village, Salamabad, which was closer to the Pakistan border. He stayed there, changed his looks and began working as a labourer. His poor wages sent him to Delhi from where, for want of a job, he returned to Mumbai.

He worked as a security guard of an under-construction building until one of his friends alerted police. Thereafter, he went back to Kashmir via Delhi. He started working as a labourer on a tunnel project near Sonmarg. The police did not arrest him right away as Mughal had apparently told the locals that he was falsely implicated in the case and had their sympathy. They waited till local sources were developed and he would come out of the prohibited area.

Nikam, who has served in the crime branch for over 16 years and has been part of several important investigations, said the team faced several problems due to terrain conditions, near-zero degree Celsius temperatures, and lack of communication facilities. “However, it was important to ensure Mughal did not know that cops were after him. Even I had to go under the guise of an engineer on the project and had to change looks to mingle with locals,” Nikam said.

Salamabad was an area near Jhelum river under Army’s jurisdiction with special security measures and it was difficult to nab Mughal from there as the Army gave identification passes to locals and there were “shoot-at-sight” orders against those without the mandatory papers.

The Army gave identification passes to locals and there were “shoot-at-sight” orders against those without the mandatory papers.

“Villagers would have alerted Mughal about our presence. To avoid the same, the team reached the nearby hydro-electric power project on the Jhelum by a vehicle used to carry engineers and other staff working on the said project.

Thereafter, the police reached his village by escaping all the barriers. However, they kept a watch on him for nearly a year till he left the village towards Srinagar area, from where he could be nabbed without any collateral damage.

Thereafter, the police, through their cultivated sources, started passing information about job opportunities to Mughal, luring him to Kargil-Sonmarg area. The team stayed there for a few days as engineers in search of a place to erect mobile network towers and became acquainted with locals. On October 10, 2017, the team picked him up from the banks of the Indus (Sindhu) river and took him back to Mumbai.

The then Police Commissioner Datta Padsalgikar applauded the efforts of the team including Nikam, head constable Dayanand Kamble, Police Naik Sandeep Kamble and constable Sandeep Talekar, which shuttled between Mumbai, J&K, and Delhi to track Mughal and later, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of the US also took note of the hunt.

Meanwhile, the pleas by Maharashtra government and Atanu Purkayastha, the victim’s father, seeking enhancement of Mughals’ punishment to death penalty are pending before the Bombay High Court.