On the Delhi-Varanasi national highway in Kanpur, a 40-year-old woman’s semi-naked body with a partially ruptured head was found, according to police on Thursday. The police said that the body was found by a man on Wednesday morning. When he saw stray dogs nibbling at it, he informed the police.

An inquiry has been started into the incident, and given the circumstances surrounding the body’s discovery, it is possible that the woman was raped and killed before having her body dumped on the highway. Another possibility, according to Deputy Commissioner of Police (South), Ravindra Kumar, is that the victim died in a road accident. “We reviewed footage from 104 CCTV cameras in the vicinity and made a breakthrough after identifying the woman in three videos. She was seen walking alone along service lanes and highways,” DCP Kumar said. 

Reacting to the incident, Akhilesh Yadav, Lok Sabha MP and chief of UP’s opposition Samajwadi Party, wrote on X, formerly Twitter, “”It is another shocking case of crime against women, a woman’s headless, naked body was found on a highway in Kanpur. The matter should be investigated fairly and such punishment should be meted out so that criminals get scared and such incidents are not repeated. I hope that the BJP-led state government will rise above politics and investigate the incident.”

In addition to the local police, forensic specialists arrived at the scene and gathered eight teeth along with additional bone pieces for examination, the source stated.

Footage from CCTV cameras at a nearby hospital showed a woman of similar build crossing the service lane towards the highway barely hours before the body was found.

The police said that the woman in the video was wearing the same trousers as those found on the body. According to them, the site where the body was found does not have any CCTV cameras installed.

Additional surveillance footage, according to the police, directed them to the woman’s home in the Govind Nagar area of Kanpur, which is roughly 4 km from the scene of the body’s identification.

The victim’s husband told the police that his wife was suffering from chronic cervical pain and had been unable to sleep for several nights, the DCP said. “She had gone out alone while he fell asleep in the early hours and might have been killed in a road accident. The body, which was kept in the freezer at the mortuary, has been sent for postmortem to confirm the cause of death,” he added. 

According to Additional Commissioner of Police (law and order), Harish Chander, the autopsy is being overseen by a group of three doctors, and the entire process is being recorded on camera. Chander went on to say that the first reports that the woman had been beheaded were untrue. The head had been severely ruptured and some flesh was found further down the road from where the body was found, he added. 

(with PTI inputs)