A warehouse worker
has been arrested in relation to the suspected double murder of a prominent
Indian artist and her lawyer, police say.
The bodies of artist
Hema Upadhyay and Harish Bhambhani were pulled from a drain in Mumbai on
Saturday. Their hands and legs had been bound and their bodies stuffed in boxes
wrapped in plastic.
Shivkumar Sadhu
Rajbhar, a metal fabricator in a Mumbai warehouse, was detained in Uttar
Pradesh state, northern India, Inspector-General Sujit Pandey told CNN.
The suspect told
investigators he and four other accomplices killed Upadhyay and Bhambhani,
Pandey said.
According to
Rajbhar's police statement, Upadhyay was murdered because she had refused to
pay around $7,500 she allegedly owed to his employer, the warehouse owner. The
suspect claimed the lawyer was murdered because "he just happened to be
present there (at the time)," Pandey said.
Police said Rajbhar
was found to be in possession of the victims' credit and debit cards, however
they don't know the extent to which he was involved in their deaths.
"What we can say
with certainty is that he was associated with the murders, but it would be too
early to say how and to what extent until further investigations
complete," Pandey said.
Rajbhar's employer is
at still at large.
Depiction of life
Upadhyay, 43,
specialized in the depiction of life in the metropolis of Mumbai, according to
New Delhi's Vadhera Art Gallery. Her artwork centered around migration,
dislocation and multi-cultural aspects of India's financial capital, it said in
a profile.
Art critic and
curator Uma Nair said in a blog post in the Times of India that Upadhyay's work tackled
urbanization, migration and landscapes.
"The news of her
death and her body wrapped in plastic had a strange macabre surrealism because
the murderer knew her language -- he/she placed her remains like a dead fish in
a dreary landscape of viciousness and hatred. RIP beautiful person," Nair
wrote in the blog headlined "Indian contemporary art's genius: Hema
Upadhyay."
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