Chandigarh: A 40-year-old man was killed by his wife and her brother in Mohali near here, with the murder coming to light while they were trying to dispose of the body stuffed in a suitcase.

The body of Ekam Singh Dhillon was found in a suitcase kept in a BMW car near his rented house in Mohali on Sunday. Dhillon's wife, Seerat Dhillon, was arrested and police claimed that she had admitted to murdering her husband with the help of her brother Vinay Pratap Singh Brar and mother Jaswinder Kaur. The Mohali police registered an FIR on the statement of Ekam’s father, Jaspal Singh. The exact motive behind the murder is not yet known. The police also confiscated Seerat’s licensed gun.

Seerat told the police that she murdered Ekam with the help of her brother Vinay Partap and one of Vinay’s friends. She said they killed Ekam around 11 pm on Saturday and when they were taking the body to dump it in a canal, they could not find the keys of the car due to which they changed their plan and decided to dump the body in the morning. “In an attempt to dispose of Ekam’s body, Seerat allegedly dumped it in a suitcase, brought it down from their bedroom on the first floor of their house to the car park. Although she could drag the suitcase downstairs, since it was too heavy with the weight of Ekam’s body, she could not lift it alone. While she was attempting to keep the suitcase in the rear seat of her BMW car, an auto-rickshaw driver saw her. He had come to drop a passenger in the locality,” said Alam Vijay Singh, Deputy Superintendent of Police, City-1.

The DSP added, “The auto-rickshaw driver offered to help her to pick up the suitcase and putting it in the car’s rear seat. In the process, the auto-rickshaw driver got blood on his hands. He got suspicious and went away. He spotted a PCR van parked at the nearby market and informed them. When the PCR reached Ekam’s house, they saw a suitcase lying in the rear seat of the BMW. The door was unlocked. They opened the suitcase and found Ekam’s body.”

The preliminary investigation revealed that Seerat and Ekam had a strained marital relationship for the past few years. The couple have a 11-year-old son and a 6-year-old daughter.

Seerat is the niece of former Congress MLA from Sardulgarh Ajit Inder Singh Mofer. Mofer contested on a Congress ticket from the seat and lost in the recent assembly elections. Mofer had brought up Seerat after her father died in her childhood.