A wedding, a parcel bomb, an English professor: How Odisha's 7-year murder mystery was solved

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Seven years after a deadly parcel bomb explosion killed a newly-wed software engineer and his elderly great-aunt, a court in Odisha’s Bolangir district on Wednesday convicted Punjilal Meher, the English lecturer behind the meticulously planned revenge attack, TimesNow reported.

Sentenced to life imprisonment and fined Rs 50,000, Meher’s conviction marks the closure of India’s first recorded parcel bomb case - a crime that stunned investigators with its cold-blooded execution.

The 2018 blast claimed the lives of 26-year-old Soumya Sekhar Sahu - just five days into his marriage - and his 85-year-old great-aunt Jenamani. Soumya’s wife, Reema, suffered severe injuries after unwrapping the "gift," which had been delivered to their Patnagarh home.

Meher, then a lecturer at Jyoti Vikas College in Bhainsa, allegedly plotted the murder after being replaced as principal by Soumya’s mother, Sanjukta Sahu. Investigators revealed he spent months preparing: stockpiling firecracker gunpowder after Diwali, studying bomb-making online and even testing smaller explosives before assembling the final device.

In a chilling display of premeditation, Meher travelled 250 km to Raipur, Chhattisgarh, to courier the bomb from a basement service with no CCTV. He used the alias "S K Sharma" and a fake address. The parcel arrived in Patnagarh on February 20 and was delivered three days later - just as Meher attended both Soumya’s wedding and, later, his funeral.

The case initially stumped investigators as there were no eyewitnesses and evidence was purely circumstantial. But a taunting anonymous letter, sent to the Bolangir Superintendent of Police, became the breakthrough. Claiming three people were behind the blast due to Soumya’s "betrayal," the letter instead exposed Meher’s command of English, a detail that narrowed the search to him.

"The language, the font size and the spacing in the letter indicated that it was sent by someone with command over English," IPS officer Arun Bothra, who led the Crime Branch probe, was quoted by TimesNow. "When we searched his house, evidence was scientifically matched. That was the turning point."

In a statement following the verdict, Sanjukta said she was satisfied with the outcome, though the pain of losing her son could never be undone. “We were hoping for capital punishment in the crime considering its rarest of the rare nature,” added Soumya’s father, Rabindra Sahu, while expressing gratitude to the judiciary.

The 2018 chargesheet included statements from 72 witnesses, along with digital evidence like laptops, hard drives and CCTV footage from the Raipur courier office. Train station receipts from Kantabanji further cemented Meher’s movements.