Thane: Police have arrested three men, including a senior citizen, for allegedly raping a 30-year-old woman and pushing her to death from a hillock located in Thane district of Maharashtra, where she went alone to visit a temple, an official said.
The woman had visited the temple on July 6 and her body was found on the hillock three days later, he said.
The accused trio has been identified as Santosh Mishra (45), Rajkumar Pandey (54), both from Pratapgarh in Uttar Pradesh, and Shyamsundar Sharma (62) from Kota in Rajasthan, a senior official of Shil-Daighar police station said.
"On July 6, the victim left her home in Navi Mumbai in a huff after some argument with family members, and reached the base of the hillock in Shilphata area to visit a Ganesh temple located atop it. Before ascending, the woman visited a nearby eatery, where she had some food. CCTV footage shows her heading towards the stairs of the temple, but it does not show her descending from there," Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCP) S E Burse said.
When she went to the temple atop the hillock, the accused trio was present there, he said.
Meanwhile, her in-laws and husband conducted a frantic search, but as they failed to find her, they approached the police and filed a missing person's complaint.
Later during the probe, the police found a woman's body from the hillock, which after verification was confirmed to be that of the victim, the official said.
The police then took into custody the three accused, who initially gave conflicting statements. Later on, they confessed to having committed the crime, Burse added.
"It is suspected that they offered her something to drink spiked with a drug before taking turns to sexually assault her. They also confined her and then pushed her to death on Monday. But all these things would be clear once in our probe," he said.
One of the accused was a replacement for a priest who had gone to Uttar Pradesh, he said, adding that the deceased was a mother of a two-and-a-half-year-old child.
"The accused have confessed to raping the woman. Her autopsy also confirms it," he said.
The accused were produced before a court, which remanded them in police custody.