A wedding, a parcel bomb and an English professor’s revenge – 7 years later, case that captivated Odisha ends in conviction

Sanjukta Sahu, the mother of Soumya Sekhar Sahu — a software engineer by profession who had just been married — said she was satisfied with the court ruling, although she added that she could not get back what she lost. Soumya’s 85-year-old great aunt, Jenamani, was also killed in the explosion, while his wife, Reema, sustained severe injuries.

“We were hoping for capital punishment in the crime considering its rarest of the rare nature. But the court sentenced life imprisonment. We express our gratitude to the court,” Rabindra Sahu, the victim’s father, told the media outside the court.

The case

On February 23, 2018 — five days into his marriage – Soumya was killed after a parcel he had just received as a gift exploded. According to investigators, the crime was planned and executed meticulously. While the police initially investigated it, the probe was taken over by the Odisha Crime Branch.

Over 100 suspects were questioned, with the investigators eventually arresting Meher, a colleague of Soumya’s mother Sanjukta. According to police sources, Meher allegedly planned the crime after Sanjukta replaced him as the principal of Jyoti Vikas College in Bhainsa. In its chargesheet, the Crime Branch named Meher as the lone accused and said that the crime was an act of “revenge”.

According to Soumya’s family, the accused had attended both the wedding and the funeral of the victim.

Meher, an English lecturer, had allegedly begun to collect firecrackers from Diwali the previous year, hoarding gunpowder used in the crackers and using the internet to learn how to assemble bombs, making some test explosives first before he made the final product. The bomb he made was then put in a cardboard box and gift-wrapped.

Days before the explosion, Punjilal attended college and returned home to collect the parcel. He took it to Kantabanji, where he boarded a train to Raipur, Chhattisgarh, around 250 km from Patnagarh town.

In Raipur, the accused allegedly looked for courier services that were in basements and that had no CCTVs, telling them that the parcel had “gift articles”. To hide his identity, he put the sender’s name down as S K Sharma and also gave an incorrect address. Then, he took an evening train back home, police sources had said.

The “gift” parcel reached Patnagarh on February 20 and was delivered to Soumya’s residence three days later.

To further mislead investigators, the accused sent an anonymous letter to the then Bolangir Superintendent of Police saying three people were involved in the “project” – the blast – and that the reason for it was “his (Soumya’s) betrayal” that led to several people losing their lives and money. The letter also asked the police to “stop harassing innocent people”.

It was this letter – allegedly aimed at derailing police investigation – that helped the Crime Branch crack the case. According to investigators, this was “a special case as there was no evidence at all when the Crime Branch took up the investigation”.

“All evidence was circumstantial and there were no eyewitnesses,” senior IPS officer Arun Bothra, who led the investigation, told reporters. “We are satisfied that we took it to conviction from a blind case, and justice is served to the family.”

While the letter sent to the Bolangir SP was meant to “deceive” the investigation agency, the accused had left “many clues in the letter”, Bothra said.

“The language, the font size and the spacing in the letter indicated that it was sent by someone with command over English. It led us to zero in on the accused, who was an English lecturer. When we searched his house, we got some evidence, which was scientifically matched. That was the turning point in the case,” Bothra said.

The agency’s chargesheet in August 2018 included statements of as many as 72 witnesses. Among their list of evidence was the letter and receipt books of the parking lot at Kantabanji railway station. Also seized were mobile phones, a laptop, pen drives, hard disks and CCTV footage of a courier service in Raipur.