TEAM HERALD
VASCO: A woman and a man were found dead from gunshot wounds in a hotel at Vasco on Thursday morning, in what is believed to be a suicide pact between the two friends.
The bodies of Nandan Pandey of Bageshwar-Uttarakand and Priyanka Barad of Vidhyanagar-Margao were found in the hotel room, barely hours after Priyanka was reported missing by her parents after she had failed to return home from work.
Incidentally, Priyanka, who was a colleague of Nandan at a factory in the Verna Industrial Estate, was due to be married to another person on April 3, in a marriage arranged by her family, police sources told Herald.
The gruesome deaths shocked residents in the port town and a large crowd gathered outside the hotel on hearing the news. A strong police force cordoned off the area, while police teams from the Vasco, Dabolim and Mormugao police stations were pressed into service, as part of joint investigations into the two deaths. DySP Laurence D’Souza, who was in Margao at the time, had to rush back to Vasco to supervise the investigations.
Narrating the sequence of events to Herald, Prabhakar Desai, the hotel receptionist, said that Nandan had checked into the hotel on Wednesday at about 9 am.
“He had booked a room for two persons for one day. Nandan was allotted Room 112 on the first floor. Before checking into the room, Nandan informed me that another person would join him later in the day,” said Desai.
“Nandan, however, instructed me to first ascertain the identity of the person, before letting the person into his room. Till my shift ended at 8 pm on Wednesday, no person had come to visit Nandan. I was not even aware if the other person due to meet Nandan was a man or a woman.”
On Thursday morning, Nandan failed to check out at 9 am and Desai then went to the room, only to find it locked from the inside.
“I knocked on the door for some time and when I did not get any response, I returned to the reception and called on his mobile number, only to get the automated message that the person dialled was busy and to call later,” added Desai.
When further attempts to contact Nandan failed, Desai alerted the hotel owner, who in turn, notified the police.
“The room was then opened in the presence of a police team. One woman was found dead on the bed, while Nandan, who had checked in on Wednesday morning, was lying face down and dead on the floor,” said Desai.
Investigating Officer PI Shailesh Narvekar of Verna police station, who is holding additional charge of Vasco police station in the absence of PI Sagar Ikoskar of Vasco, told Herald that Nandan and Priyanka had bullet wounds from a country-made revolver.
“It appears that the revolver was placed in the mouths of both Nandan and Priyanka, before the gun was fired. While the body of Priyanka was on the bed, Nandan was lying dead on the floor with the revolver in his hand,” said PI Narvekar.
Police have recovered the two empty shells of the bullets and the country-made revolver from the hotel room.
As investigations commenced into the motive behind the twin deaths, the police learnt that Nandan and Priyanka were employed in the same factory at Verna Industrial Estate. While Priyanka was senior to Nandan, they were known to each other for quite some time.
“On Wednesday evening, Priyanka had failed to return home after office hours and her parents had filed a missing complaint at the Margao police station that night,” a police official told Herald.
PI Narvekar stated that while Priyanka’s body was identified by her family members, the police are in the process of contacting Nandan’s family in Uttarakand.
Confirming that there was no suicide note in the hotel room, PI Narvekar also told Herald that the gun shots had gone unnoticed in the hotel.
“Police teams checked with occupants in an adjacent room and found out that they were under the influence of alcohol at the time of the incident and could not confirm if they had heard any gun shots. Moreover, country-made revolvers do not emit a loud noise when they are fired and these two shots could have gone unnoticed,” PI Narvekar said.
Both bodies have been sent to the GMC for an autopsy and DySP Laurence D’Souza is supervising investigations into the case.
