A 46-year-old man was arrested on Wednesday from Kolkata's Behala for reportedly keeping his mother's corpse in a deep freezer for almost three years to collect her pension every month using her thumb impression.
A 46-year-old man was arrested on Wednesday from Kolkata's Behala for reportedly keeping his mother's corpse in a deep freezer for almost three years to collect her pension every month using her thumb impression.
"The dead body of a woman who had died three years ago was recovered from a house located at 25 SN Chatterjee Road in Behala area of Kolkata", said a Behala police official.
According to the reports, the woman's son Subhabrata Mazumdar had preserved the body inside an ice-cream freezer with proper chemicals to avoid rotting.
Deceased Beena Majumdar (70) was a retired FCI officer who used to get a pension of Rs 50,000 per month.
"On Wednesday night after getting information from a source, a police team headed by DC (South-West) Neelanjan Biswas searched Subhabrata's house and recovered his mother's body from the deep freezer. The inner parts of the body, like liver, lungs etc were found missing and chemicals were also recovered from the house," said Behala police official.
The officials further added that the accused was using his dead mother's thumb impression to withdraw money from her pension account. "We questioned the son and his 90-year-old father who was also aware of the incident. We have arrested the son and he is in police custody."
"The cause of the death is yet to be known. We have sent the body for postmortem and further probe is on," the officials added.
"The woman was sick and had to be hospitalised where she died in 2015. Her body was brought back home but what happened after that no one knew," ABP Ananda quoted a neighbour as saying. “He had told us that time that his mother’s body had been kept at Peace Haven,” the neighbour added.
According to the police, during the search operation, they also found a forged living certificate of Beena.
In 2015, police officials found a man in Kolkata's Robinson Street, living with the rotting corpse of his sister who had died a year back. Not just sister, the police had also found two other corpses of dogs inside the house who had died two years back. Upon investigation, police had said that the man was mentally unstable.
A similar incident was reported from Simhat village of Haringhata at Nadia district in September, 2016 where two brothers were found to be living in the same house with their mother’s body for nearly nine months after her demise.