A newly-married couple received what they thought was a wedding gift five day after their lavish big day which happened to a be bomb that killed software engineer after opening the box.<\/p>\n
Soumya Sekhar Sahu, a 26-year-old software engineer, and his 22-year-old wife Reema, were pottering around in the kitchen at their newly-built family home in Patnagarh, India.<\/p>\n
Soumya heard the clanging of the latch of their metal gate and a delivery man stood outside, holding a parcel addressed to him.<\/p>\n
A sticker on the box said it had been sent by SK Sharma from Raipur, some 230km (142 miles) away.<\/p>\n
Reema remembers her husband opening the box in the kitchen, and finding a parcel covered in green paper with a white thread sticking out of it, while his 85-year-old grand-aunt Jemamani Sahu came up from behind to see what the parcel contained.<\/p>\n
“This looks like a wedding gift,” Soumya Sekhar told his wife. “The only thing that I don’t know is the sender. I don’t know anyone in Raipur.”<\/p>\n
As he pulled the thread, there was a flash of light and a huge explosion rocked the kitchen. The three were knocked off their feet, and collapsed on the floor, bleeding profusely.<\/p>\n
Soumya Sekhar and Jemamani Sahu, both suffered from 90% burns and died on their way to the hospital. Reema is recovering slowly in the burns ward in a government hospital.<\/p>\n
The horrific attack that took place on February 23 and no one appears to have the faintest idea who killed Soumya Sekhar who was described as a “genial and god fearing young man who worshipped a guru” by relatives and friends.<\/p>\n
Two dozen investigators have questioned more than 100 people – friends and relatives of the couple mainly – in four cities in connection with the killing. They have scoured mobile phone records, and scanned laptops and phones belonging to the couple.<\/p>\n
Forensic experts are still trying to ascertain how sophisticated the bomb was. On the face of it, investigators say, it appeared to be a fairly crude device wrapped in jute thread which spewed white smoke after the blast.<\/p>\n
of the last pictures of the couple at the reception<\/p>\n
“This is a fiendishly complex case,” Balangir’s senior police official Sashi Bhusan Satpathy said. “This was the work of a fairly knowledgeable person well-versed in the arts of bomb making.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A newly-married couple received what they thought was a wedding gift five day after their lavish big day which happened to a be bomb that killed software engineer after opening the box. Soumya Sekhar Sahu, a 26-year-old software engineer, and his 22-year-old wife Reema, were pottering around in the kitchen at their newly-built family home […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":26144,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,53,283],"tags":[975],"class_list":["post-26143","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international-news","category-latest","category-top-news","tag-wedding-gift-bomb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26143"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26143\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}