A moving train, a crushed skull & ‘unusual’ injuries: Rajkot Railway Police crack woman’s murder, arrest 1 | Ahmedabad News

After the body was shifted to the Sub-District Hospital (SDH) in Gondal, Sub-Inspector K U Vala of the GRP reached there and identified the woman as 44-year-old Manju Vinu Baraiya. During the inquest of the body, the GRP said the doctors also found that she had injuries on both hands, as if she had fallen forward onto the side of the train.
The doctor recommended that the post-mortem examination be done at Rajkot Civil Hospital. An Accidental Death (AD) report was initially filed at the Rajkot GRP police station.

Doctors and police concurred that the positioning of the body parallel to the railway tracks and the kind of injuries the woman had suffered were “inconsistent with suicides or accidents”. Thus began a deeper probe into Baraiya’s death.

On the doubts that led to a possible murder investigation in this case, GRP Rajkot Inspector HM Rana told The Indian Express, “The first clue was the type of injuries on the body of the deceased and inconsistency with suicides.”

The first step was to check for any clues on the CCTV cameras at and near the site of Baraiya’s death. They found footage from Gondal railway station where Baraiya was seen walking along with a young man along the tracks on the night of August 3, hours before her death. However, this man was not present at the scene when the public found Baraiya’s body and neither had he informed the ambulance or police about the incident, which instantly made him a suspect for investigators.

SIs KU Vala and BJ Jadeja took this CCTV footage and visited Payal, the daughter of Manju Baraiya, who lives with her husband in Gondal itself. “She identified the man with her mother as 28-year-old Prakash Kishor Solanki. She told us that her mother had separated from her father Vinu Baraiya about 3 years previously and had subsequently been in a relationship with this man,” said Inspector H M Rana, who is also in-charge DySP of Rajkot Division GRP.
A police statement said, “Payal told the police that since the deceased Manju Baraiya and Prakash Solanki were in a relationship for 2-3 years, Manju has been asking Prakash to marry her but the latter had been declining and the two had fought several times over the issue.”

According to the GRP, after Prakash Solanki was apprehended, he allegedly admitted to having met Manju Baraiya on August 3 and fought with her, again over her insistence on getting married to him. Inspector Rana said that Solanki’s family were against him marrying an older woman almost two decades his senior.

The GRP claimed that Solanki had further admitted to having calmed the situation and taken Baraiya to Gondal railway station where they had walked alongside the tracks. He had then allegedly also admitted to having pushed her headlong into the path of a running train that was going from Junagadh towards Rajkot, causing her death, before fleeing.

The police are now trying to collect actual evidence of the crime. While bloodstains and other evidence has allegedly been found from near the tracks where Baraiya’s body was found, the police have a tough time ahead collecting evidence from the train itself. Inspector Rana said that there were three trains that passed by Gondal railway station that night. The police are trying to find out which one was linked to Baraiya’s death.

Apart from just identifying the correct train, the investigators will also have to identify the exact coach on which Baraiya’s head had hit, and that too before the coaches and engine are separated to form another train or this particular train is cleaned by railway staff.

Further investigation is underway, police said.