Bijapur: A septic tank connected to toilets built for construction workers on premises owned by Bijapur-based contractor Suresh Chandrakar became witness to one of the most gruesome murders of a journalist in recent times.
A preliminary postmortem report suggested that 34-year-old freelance journalist Mukesh Chandrakar from Chhattisgarh—whose body was found in the septic tank—died due to multiple injuries to his head, back and stomach that led to severe blood loss. Police said his body was dumped inside the tank allegedly by Suresh’s younger brother and supervisor.
How did police go about cracking the case?
An analysis of Mukesh’s Call Detail Record (CDR) provided investigators with the initial lead suggesting the involvement of Suresh’s younger brother, Ritesh, after Mukesh went missing on the night of 1 January. But it was the fresh plaster on the septic tank from where the body was recovered that initially aroused suspicions.
Doubts about the tank deepened because Mukesh’s older brother, Yukesh, alerted police about an email that showed his final location in that area in Bijapur town.
On 4 January, Bijapur district police arrested Suresh’s younger brothers—Ritesh and Dinesh—along with their supervisor Mahendra Ramteke. Two days later, the investigators also arrested the prime accused Suresh from Hyderabad.
“The moment Bijapur Police received the complaint, we sought CDR of both Mukesh and Ritesh and banked on technical steps to trace the suspects. The deeper we went into the initial inputs, the suspicion on Ritesh and his brother only grew deeper,” Bijapur Additional Superintendent of Police (ASP) Mayank Gurjar, who is leading the Special Investigation Team (SIT) probing the case, told ThePrint.
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‘Mera bachha had gone missing’
Mukesh’s brother, Yukesh, recalled the hours before he realised his brother was missing.
Yukesh, also a journalist, did not find his younger brother in his rented house on the morning of 2 January. He told ThePrint he called Mukesh’s number after his son alerted him about Mukesh’s absence, but the phone was switched off. “I first thought he had gone on some assignment and was out of network coverage,” a distraught Yukesh told ThePrint.
Yukesh became worried when his repeated attempts to reach Mukesh failed. He then contacted all his brother’s friends and acquaintances, but in vain. “I wasn’t worried because his phones used to be unreachable when he used to go for reporting. But never ever had he stayed out of contact for so long. This was concerning,” said Yukesh.
“When I got to know that he went to meet Ritesh and no one had seen him afterward, it didn’t sit down well with me. He wasn’t just a younger brother to me. I taught him journalism bit by bit like my son. Mera bachha had gone missing and I feared the worst.”
Among those he called to check about Mukesh’s whereabouts was Ritesh, Suresh’s younger brother, currently in judicial custody in connection with Mukesh’s murder.
Yukesh said Ritesh told him about being in touch with Mukesh and that they had planned a meeting that never materialised. He said he wasn’t aware of Mukesh’s whereabouts.
Yukesh got his first lead from Nilesh Tripathi, a Raipur-based NDTV journalist with whom Mukesh had done two reports—including one exposing the dilapidated condition of a road built by Suresh Chandrakar.
Based on Tripathi’s information, Yukesh approached the police to lodge a missing persons report.
In the police complaint, a copy of which ThePrint has seen, Yukesh said Tripathi informed him about Mukesh mentioning a plan for Ritesh to pick him up and take him to Suresh Chandrakar. In the police complaint, Yukesh also informed the police about Mukesh’s laptop showing his last location near the contractor’s camp for labourers.
Trip to Delhi unravelled plot
Acting on Yukesh’s complaint at 8.20 pm that Mukesh had gone missing after meeting Ritesh, police secured the CDRs of both Mukesh and Ritesh.
Mukesh’s last location led them to Jangla area, some 10 km from Bijapur towards Bhairamgarh. But they could not find anything substantial.
Meanwhile, another police team reached the spot flagged by Yukesh based on the last location recorded by Mukesh’s Gmail account.
Police called Suresh to provide the keys to all 17 rooms at the workers’ accommodation and searched the area thoroughly—but without any success.
They said Suresh misled the investigators, saying he had had no communication with his brother Ritesh and attributed the fresh plaster on the septic tank to renovation work.
However, three hours later at around 11.30 pm, police got a significant lead when the call records of both Mukesh and Ritesh established that the last two contacted numbers on Mukesh’s phone number belonged to Ritesh.
Suspicious about Ritesh’s role based on his last location and call records, police alerted their counterparts in neighbouring districts and major exit points such as Raipur airport.
The investigators made a major breakthrough when a CCTV camera at the Kondagaon toll plaza captured him crossing the plaza around 8.20 am on 2 January in a Thar SUV.
“Based on his movement around the Kondagaon toll plaza, we made a rough estimate of the time he could reach Raipur if he was planning to flee the state. He was a frequent visitor to Delhi since he studied there,” a police officer said.
Investigators became suspicious when they found that Ritesh had booked a ticket to Delhi early on 2 January, hours after Mukesh’s murder. Footage from another CCTV confirmed his presence at the Raipur airport that same evening.
Meanwhile, police teams in Bijapur received inputs about Ritesh’s brother’s movement from Jagdalpur to Bijapur the same night which led them to probe the possibility of more than one person being behind Mukesh’s disappearance since the evening of 1 January.
At around noon, police took Dinesh into custody from a hospital in Bijapur. After three hours of questioning, he allegedly revealed the sequence of events leading up to Mukesh’s murder and the disposal of his body. Acting on his information, police arrested Ramteke and recovered Mukesh’s body from the septic tank. “The CDR records established him (Ritesh) to be the person who last contacted Mukesh. Moreover, with his phone switched off and him booking a ticket to Delhi for the same day, everything pointed us in the same direction that he was somewhere involved in Mukesh going missing,” a police officer said.
The plan and the motive
Police investigations revealed that Mukesh and Ritesh had a phone call around 8 pm on 1 January, following which both reached the place where Mukesh was eventually killed.
While they were eating in room number 11 of the 17-room facility, Ritesh allegedly attacked Mukesh and accused him of coming in their way despite being on such close terms with each other.
When the confrontation turned ugly, Ritesh—along with Mahendra Ramteke—allegedly attacked Mukesh on his chest, back, stomach and head with iron rods. “Based on what we have gathered so far, Mukesh was called there as part of the plan to kill him that day,” a police officer said.
Police officers are also probing if Ramteke, who had quit the job three months before Mukesh’s murder, was roped in as part of the conspiracy to kill Mukesh.
“There is a possibility that Ramteke who had rejoined work with Chandrakar was roped in purely for this plan,” another police officer said.
Police officers aware of the matter said that Suresh had withdrawn a huge sum of money from one of his bank accounts around the same time they allegedly hatched the conspiracy to kill Mukesh.
“A withdrawal of a huge cash amount in lakhs days before the murder as well as Suresh Chandrakar accepting that he was really upset at Mukesh’s reportage exposing corruption in his project suggested only one thing: that it was a murder they were looking to execute,” a police officer said.
“Suresh Chandrakar feared the worst for his booming empire built on government contracts. Mukesh’s report prompted the government to launch an inquiry and raids by state GST on his firm. He saw his empire coming to a crashing end because of Mukesh’s journalism,” another officer added on the motive behind the gruesome murder.
Mukesh had recently exposed alleged corruption in a Rs 120-crore road construction project. The original tender for the project was Rs 50 crore, but the cost escalated to Rs 120 crore without any changes to the scope of work. His investigation led the state government to initiate an inquiry into the matter.
Police said the accused panicked after the murder as they didn’t have a plan to dispose of the body. They then allegedly dumped it in the tank on the premises. “The plaster to cover it was an afterthought,” an officer said.
Following the murder, Ritesh called his Jagdalpur-based brother, Dinesh, and left for Bodli village in Dantewada. Investigators suspect that the trio allegedly hatched a conspiracy in Bodli to erase all evidence such as Mukesh’s mobile phones, which they allegedly threw into lakes across Bijapur.
Ritesh left for Raipur in Suresh’s car before flying to New Delhi the following day on 2 January. He was taken into custody the next day at Raipur airport while returning from New Delhi. Three days later, the prime accused in the case, contractor Suresh Chandrakar, was nabbed from Hyderabad.
(Edited by Sugita Katyal)
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