Raipur: When villagers in Gariba in Chhattisgarh’s Gariyaband district arrived at the cremation ground to bury a deceased resident this week, something didn’t add up. Beside the spot prepared for the funeral, lay two freshly dug graves. The soil was still damp and loosely packed, as if the earth had been turned only days earlier.
“Whose graves are these,” someone asked. Nobody seemed to have an answer. What puzzled the villagers was simple: nobody else in the village had died. As people gathered around the graves and tried to make sense of them, another question surfaced. A tribal couple Rajaram Netam and his wife Asho Bai, from the village who had not been seen for several days, were still missing.
What started as a conversation at a funeral soon unravelled into a gruesome murder mystery. On Thursday, police would exhume two bodies stuffed into one sack from the graves, exposing a double murder that investigators say had been concealed for nearly a week.
The victims, identified as Rajaram Netam, 45, and his wife Asho Bai, 40, lived in Gariba village in Shobha region. According to police, the couple was allegedly beaten to death on June 6 following a long-running family dispute. Investigators said the accused then packed the bodies into sacks and secretly buried them at the village cremation ground in an attempt to erase evidence of the crime.
The accused Lakhiram Netam, the brother of deceased, and his sons Raghuram and Nakul Ram were arrested. Police said Rajaram was one of seven brothers and had frequent disputes over land and property with members of the extended family. The couple had no children and lived in the family settlement.
An argument on June 6 escalated into violence, during which the accused attacked the couple with wooden sticks, causing fatal injuries. For days, the crime remained hidden.
The breakthrough came only when another death in the village brought residents to the cremation ground. Shobha police station inspector Pawan Verma said that villagers immediately found the freshly raised mounds suspicious and as discussions spread through the village, attention turned to the missing couple. Information was passed on by the village head to police.
According to the confession, the accused said that they buried the bodies during the night, which is against the local custom. The remains have been sent for forensic examination and samples forwarded to the forensic science laboratory in Raipur.
