A woman has been arrested in Mumbra area of Thane district of Maharashtra on charges of killing her lover with the help of her relative.
The woman reportedly killed her partner and stuffed his body into a blue drum before throwing it down the drain, in an uncanny resemblance to the sensational Meerut murder that took place in March 2025, news agency PTI reported.
Thane police said on Friday that they had solved the case after cops arrested the accused woman, a nurse by profession. This comes more than a month after the nurse’s partner, a 24-year-old civil engineer, was found murdered, his body stuffed in a blue drum and dumped in a sewer drain in Vasai in Palghar district. Besides the nurse, her brother was also detained for aiding the murder.
Read also | The main accused has been arrested in the Dahanu Virar RTI activist murder case
Failed blackmail attempt led to murder: Police
According to the police, the murder was the result of a failed extortion attempt. The nurse, identified as Mahjabeen Sheikh, allegedly lent the deceased Arbaaz Khan some money.
“With the intention of extorting money from him, the accused, including Mahjabeen and her relatives, lured him to a secluded place in Vasai,” the agency quoted an official as saying. The accused then tied Khan’s hands and legs and beat him to death with PVC pipes, the official said.
The case came to light after Khan, who was working in a private company in Dombivali, went missing on April 3 after he left for Dadar in Mumbai to collect work-related payments.
“…His father filed a complaint with the police. Analysis of his call records led him to nurse Mahjabeen Sheikh, with whom he was in a relationship,” the official said, according to PTI.
After analyzing Khan’s mobile phone, his last location was traced to Vasai. It turns out that Mahjabin was also in the same area around that time. The decomposed body of the victim was discovered in Virar Phatha along the Mumbai-Ahmedabad Expressway on April 5, the official said.
Subsequently, Mahjabeen and her brother Tariq Sheikh were arrested on May 7. Her husband, Hassan, and his other accomplice, Mujbur Talib Khan, have absconded, Mumbra police station chief inspector Anil Shinde told PTI.
Read also | Rape and murder of a minor girl: Former Maharashtra Home Minister demands death penalty for the accused
What is the Meerut ‘Blue Drum’ case?
In the Meerut case, Saurabh Rajput, a merchant marine, was murdered by his wife and her lover, Sahil Shukla. His body was dismembered and stuffed into a blue drum enclosed in concrete.
The accused allegedly drugged Rajput before killing him and then fled to Himachal Pradesh after the killing. Further investigations into the case revealed that Muskaan had been planning the murder since November 2023.
Police said Saurabh was killed because he was an “obstacle” in Muskaan and Sahil’s love affair. They were arrested on March 18, 2025. Muskaan reportedly confessed to killing her husband in front of her family before she was arrested.
