Mumbai, Dec 28: Barely 24 hours after Hema Upadhyay and her lawyer Harish Bhambhani were found murdered, their bodies packed in cartons and dumped in a drain in Kandivali, the Mumbai Police had on December 13 found one more body, this one dismembered and packed in two suitcases that had been discarded in a drain near the Indian Oil premises off the Ghatkopar-Mankhurd Link Road in Deonar.

Even after two weeks, investigators from the Deonar police station admitted that the body still remains unidentified.

The body, that of a woman, was found in two suitcases: the torso and legs were stuffed in one bag and the hands in another.

The police said they have released a sketch and are trying to identify her but are yet to get any useful lead.

A technician working on the maintenance of the traffic signal had spotted one of the suitcases in the gutter and had alerted the police. The police opened the suitcase to find the body of a woman with her throat slit and both her hands chopped off. Minutes later, they found another suitcase in the same gutter, which had her clothes and the two chopped hands.

An officer said that as per procedure, they checked all the complaints registered for missing persons across the city to see if anyone has reported a woman in her early thirties missing. But there were no matches. The police also did not find anything with the body that could give them a clue to trace the area where the woman might have resided.

The only thing they found was that her hair had been combed and made into a pony tail on one side, while the other side was uncombed. “We have enquired in the locality. Now we are more or less certain that the woman did not reside in Deonar,” D Gaikwad, senior inspector of Deonar police station, told The Indian Express.

The police thought they had a lead when they were informed of a woman missing in Navi Mumbai. They went to Sanpada to figure out if this was the same woman but the probe did not yield much.

The Deonar police are now probing the possibility that the woman may have belonged to another state and was brought to the city and killed.

An officer from the Crime Branch, that is carrying out a parallel probe in the matter, also admitted “that currently there are no leads in the case.”