Lucknow:
A 20-year-old woman was murdered by her own cousin in Lucknow. She remained buried for six days in the lawn of her own house, before the police finally found her body and dug it up.
"The plan was to murder her, dispose off her body and then ask for ransom," said Saket Mishra, the accused.
It's a chilling confession by a cousin who killed his younger sister for money and buried her body in the lawn of her house.
Savarna, who was preparing for engineering entrance exams, was last seen a week ago and it was her cousin Saket, who along with a relative hatched a plot to kill her and then demand a ransom of Rs five lakh, posing as kidnappers.
But things didn't go according to plan. After repeated requests from Savarna's parents to trace their missing daughter, police visited their house.
Seeing a barren patch of the lawn freshly dug and with foul smell coming out, the lawn was dug up only to find Savarna's decaying body. The other accused in the case describes what exactly happened.
"I heard a scream, and I reached the bedroom. Then I saw him strangulate her using a towel. The towel has been brought here. Then he sat on top of her. When I removed the body from underneath him, her body had become completely still," said Ankit Mishra.
After killing Savarna, her cousin lodged a missing person's complaint with the police. To make it look like a case of kidnapping, Ankit left Savarna's two-wheeler in the parking lot of a mall.
"Since she was of a good build and was fairly intelligent, they thought that we will kill her first and then bury her, and then made the demand for ransom," said Prem Prakash, DIG, Lucknow.
Police now wait for the post-mortem report to know if Savarna was sexually assaulted before being killed.