The car in which the body was discovered in a garage in Kasba area on Thursday……Debobrata Shome
The horror unfolded on Thursday morning when ground-floor residents of the adjoining G+4 building—unable to endure a sickening, foul odour that had been steadily intensifying over the past 10 to 15 days—decided to investigate the source of the stench. “This car has been gathering dust here for 10 years, completely neglected.
“We had been getting a faint bad smell for the last 10 to 15 days, but we initially assumed a stray cat or rat had died somewhere inside the open drain,” said a resident, Sampa Das. Upon inspecting the neglected garage located right next door to a local student tutorial centre, residents peeked inside the locked car and spotted the decomposed body, prompting an immediate distress call to the Kasba Police Station. Police and forensic experts found the victim’s body slumped horizontally across the front interior, with the head resting near the driver’s seat and the remaining torso lying across the front passenger seat. The advanced state of decomposition indicated that the death had occurred weeks prior to its being located. Crucially, the vehicle’s registration number plates had been deliberately removed, further complicating immediate identification. The recovery inside a densely populated neighbourhood sent shockwaves through the locality, triggering widespread anxiety among residents about security in their immediate surroundings. “By Thursday morning, the stench became so unbearable that we couldn’t keep our windows open. Never in our wildest dreams did we imagine a rotting corpse was lying inside a locked car right next to where our children go for daily tuition,” added Das. Another local resident expressed deep concern over the presence of abandoned vehicles in tight residential lanes. How could someone enter a locked private garage in a busy area, get inside a car, and die without anyone noticing for weeks? It has frightened everyone in the neighbourhood, and we want the police to thoroughly check if there is a murder mystery behind this. ”