Dubai: Dubai Police have arrested a butcher on suspicion of killing a woman, three months after her headless body was found in a desert area in Al Warqa’a on Academic City Road.
The suspect was a relative of the victim, Manormeeta Salwaro Dadi, a Filipina who worked as a domestic helper for a family in Abu Dhabi, Gulf News quoted Lt Gen Khamis Mattar Al Mazeina, Dubai Police Chief, as saying.
The suspect had allegedly borrowed Dh10,000 from the victim and killed her when she demanded her money back, the report said. After killing the woman, the suspect reportedly dumped her body in Dubai, cut off her head and hands, burnt them and then buried them in a sandy area in Ajman.
The murder was reportedly discovered on May 27 when a Dubai Municipality cleaner informed the police about finding a headless body in a highly decomposed state.
“It took a lot of investigative work to identify the woman as we did not have her fingerprints or picture. We had to go through the list of absconding workers, working one by one, and, finally, we matched her DNA. The list had 9,751 names,” Lt. Gen. Al Mazeina was quoted as saying by Gulf News.
The police reportedly collected DNA from the belongings of absconding maids, and tested the victim’s DNA against them.
It took around three months of painstaking work to obtain a match. As soon as the victim was identified, a police team worked on finding out the people she knew, which finally led them to the suspect.
The suspect was arrested in his home in Abu Hail at 4am on Tuesday.
Maj. Gen. Khalil Ebrahim Al Mansouri, Assistant to the Dubai Police Chief for Criminal Investigation Affairs, reportedly said the suspect confessed that he took a cleaver and a knife from his home and drove his friend’s car to Abu Dhabi to meet the victim.
“In his confession, the suspect said that he got the idea of how to carry out his crime from movies in general and specifically zombie movies,” Al Mansouri reportedly said.
The suspect also told the police that he decided to kill the woman after she kept “harassing” him to pay back the money he owed her. “He said he placed a large black plastic bag on the passenger seat and covered it with a jacket so that the blood did not fall on the seat when he killed her,” Al Mansouri was quoted as saying.
In May, the suspect convinced the victim to get in the car and drove her to a deserted area in Musaffah area in Abu Dhabi while they argued about the money. He stabbed her multiple times till she died. He then covered the body with a towel, wiped the blood splattered on the windshield and drove back to Dubai, reported Gulf News.
In an isolated area in Dubai, he cut off her head and hands, put them in a bag in the trunk and dumped the body in Al Warqa’a, the report said.
He then got the car cleaned at a car wash, and dumped the knives and clothes he was wearing in a building’s garbage chute, it added.
The following morning, the suspect drove to Ajman to burn the victim’s head and hands, using an accelerant, before burying them. Police later recovered the burnt body parts from Ajman. The suspect is a butcher by profession, and allegedly sold meat illegally from his home in Dubai, reported Gulf News.
