MUMBAI: In one of most macabre cases of familicide the country has witnessed, an educated man, early on Sunday, allegedly murdered 14 members of his extended family at Kasarvadavli in Thane near here and hanged himself with the blood-stained knife in his hand.
During the cold-blooded incident, likely to jolt even the most apathetic, Hansil Warekar, 35, reportedly slashed the throat of his parents, wife, two children, three sisters and their children around 1.30 am. Another sister of Warekar, Subiya Bharmar, survived the attack and was undergoing treatment. The deceased include Warekar’s three-month-old daughter and five-month-old nephew. The police believe that the knife used for the mass murder had been earlier used for butchering goat for ‘kurbani’.
Warekar, who worked for a chartered accountant firm and handled filing of IT returns, stayed with his parents, wife and children at a two-storey house at Kasarvadavli village. He reportedly earned `45,000 a month. The motive for the killings has not been established yet, though the police said property dispute could be the reason.
The killings came to light when neighbours heard Subiya’s cries for help around 2.30 am and dragged her out through a window. The police said Warekar had called his sisters along with their children for a party on Saturday. His sisters resided in Navi Mumbai and Bhiwandi. They had come to his house with their children while their husbands had stayed home.
Ashutosh Dumbare, joint commissioner of Thane Police, said, “Prima facie evidence suggests that the accused bolted all the doors of the house and murdered his family members while they were asleep with a knife that we found near his body. The accused then hung himself.
There were three rooms in the house. While he was in a room with his wife and two daughters on the first floor, his parents and sisters were in separate rooms on the ground floor.”
Dumbare said the police came to know about the details from Subiya. “Hansil had slit the upper portion of Subiya’s throat. She survived the attack and screamed for help,” he said.
“Her in-laws, who were in a neighbouring house, heard her cries and tried opening the door, but found it locked. They then broke open the grill of a window on the ground floor and entered the house. It was then that the police were alerted,” Dumbare added. The neighbours knew Hansil as a calm person who rarely lost his cool.
“He had cordial relations with everyone. We are shocked about the incident,” said a neighbour who identified himself as Ashraf.
That Warekar, a Konkani Muslim, was a religious person was evident from the holy text encrypted on the house’s main door.
He also worked as a trustee of a nearby mosque.
Cameraman dies of heart attack
Ratan Bhowmik, a stringer cameraman with a Hindi news channel in Thane, suffered a cardiac arrest and died hours after he informed his office about the mass killings at Kasarvadavli village.