Kolkata, Feb 26 (PTI) The woman and her daughter, who were arrested in Kolkata on the charge of murdering a female relative, followed a plan and committed the crime as they were after her assets, a police officer said on Wednesday.

The duo was caught red-handed by locals when they were trying to dump a suitcase containing body parts of the woman into the Hooghly river at a ghat in north Kolkata's Ahiritola area on Tuesday. She had come from Jorhat in Assam to stay with the accused.

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The investigators did not rule out the presence of a third male person when the body parts were severed.

Postmortem examination of the body of 55-year-old Sumita Ghosh revealed that she fell unconscious because of “torture by the two women” and eventually died, the officer said.

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The autopsy also suggested that the killing took place at least 36 hours before the body was mutilated and packed in a suitcase before being brought to Kolkata from Madhyamgram in North 24 Parganas district where the two lived in a rented accommodation.

The accused severed the victim's legs from the ankle using a ‘boti' (household vegetable and fish cutter) to put the body into the suitcase after wrapping the body parts in a large plastic bag, the officer said.

It is suspected that a third person, probably a man, helped the two in dismembering the leg and the police are investigating into this angle also.

The police are planning to use divers to rescue the ‘boti' which they had thrown into a pond beside their rented house in Madhyagram, he said.

"The two women have claimed that they had hit the deceased woman on her head with a blunt object but it seems to be untrue. The post-mortem suggested that there were no lacerated wounds on her head," the officer of Kolkata Police's Detective Department said.

"It also pointed out that there were several hematomas (clotted blood formed in an organ, tissue or body space) which were probably caused after the victim's head was repeatedly banged on the wall. And it was the daughter who murdered the victim," he said.

Investigations revealed that the blue trolley bag was purchased from Burrabazar area in Kolkata on Monday and the daughter had gone to a jewellery shop and placed an order for ornaments worth Rs 50,000, the officer said.

He said that the murder was a planned one and not out of rage.

"Circumstantial evidence and their statements proved that they had planned to kill the woman. The daughter had beaten up the victim several times causing the injuries. There were injuries on several parts of her body," he said.

On the motive behind the killing of the woman, police claimed that it was primarily the greed of the accused to grab the property of the deceased.

The victim woman owned several properties in Assam's Jorhat, the officer said, adding that she also had a gold jewelleries in the bank locker.

The probe revealed that the PIN of the debit card belonging to the victim was recently changed and on Monday the daughter withdrew around Rs 25,000 from an ATM kiosk.

"There have been withdrawals from the victim's bank account which had a balance of Rs 3.5 lakh. It seems that the accused two women were after her assets,” he said, adding that they have seized three mobile phones from their possession.

Meanwhile, when produced at a court here in Kolkata, the mother-daughter duo was remanded to one-day police custody.

Since the murder took place in Madhyamgram, the court ordered the Barasat Police to take over the investigation.

"The accused will be produced at a court in Barasat tomorrow," the officer said.

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)