Nearly a month after a woman was murdered in Chennai and her dismembered body parts were found inside an abandoned trolley bag on board the Tamil Nadu Express at Agra Cantonment, the Guduvanchery police have arrested a couple from Manipur in the case.
The arrested — Manik Uddin Laskar and Bhagabati Majhi — are being brought to Chennai after obtaining a prisoner of transit warrant from the judicial magistrate of Jirbham district in the northeastern State. A senior officer of the Tambaram Police Commissionerate said the team was expected to reach Chennai on Sunday night. “Only after the suspects are brought to the city and interrogated the entire the murder plot could be found,” the officer said.
The police had arrested the couple on Saturday in connection with the murder of a 38-year-old woman in Guduvanchery, whose decomposed and dismembered body parts were found stuffed inside a trolley bag aboard the Chennai-New Delhi Tamil Nadu Express at Agra earlier this month. While Laskar hails from Dakshin Krishnapur, Sonabarighat, in Assam’s Cachar district his wife Bhagabati Majhi is from Odisha.
The murder came to light on August 5, when the body was found in the rear general compartment of the Tamil Nadu Express in Agra. The Agra Railway Police launched an investigation.
After being informed, the Government Railway Police at the Chennai Central railway station and the Railway Protection Force examined CCTV footage from Platform 4 and spotted a man and a woman carrying a suspicious trolley bag and boarding the train. Their movements led investigators to Guduvanchery, where they identified a rented house on Masuthi Street in which the couple had allegedly been staying with another woman. The deceased was later identified as Hayathun Nisha, 38, wife of Jahhur Khan and a native of Jagatsinghpur in Odisha. She stayed in Guduvanchery and worked at a private firm.
The police found Laskar and Bhagabati had gone missing. During the investigation, the police also recovered body parts from a cooking vessel on the premises. Tambaram City Police Commissioner Prem Anand Sinha formed a special team to trace the suspects. A senior police officer said the team travelled to a remote and difficult-to-access area of Manipur in search of Laskar. The team stayed in the area for more than a week and tracked his movements before locating him. “The area was remote, we could not move around much during the day, and it was also raining there. The team camped for more than a week and eventually traced the accused,” the officer said.
The police said the motive for the murder would be established only after the couple was brought to Tambaram and questioned.
Published – August 30, 2026 11:55 pm IST
