Police on Tuesday found human remains, including three skulls, near a farm house of starlet Laila Khan, raising suspicion that they could of the Bollywood actress and her family members who had been missing since early last year.
The remains were dug out after a day-long search by a team of Mumbai Crime Branch near the farm house in Igatpuri, 100 km from Mumbai, in Nashik district, police sources said.
While there is no indication of their identities at this stage, there is a strong possibility that they are of Laila and her family members since the key suspect in their kidnapping case has claimed they had been murdered.
Crime Branch is probing the case. Prime suspect Pervez Tak had told Jammu and Kashmir Police, which arrested him last month in a forgery case, that he shot dead Laila and others in Maharashtra last year after kidnapping them.
"We have found three skulls and cloth pieces in the septic tank of the farm house this evening," said a highly- placed source involved in the investigation. Tak, a forest contractor, was taken to Igatpuri by the team following his claim that the starlet and her family members had been killed and their bodies dumped. The human remains were recovered from the place shown by Tak, the sources said.
"Tak showed us some places where we dug and found these remains." Police said they would send the remains to forensic laboratory to ascertain the identities. Rains and fog hampered the search operation. The starlet and her family - mother Shelina, elder sister Hazmina, twin siblings Zara and Imran and another relative - went missing from Mumbai in February 2011.
A case of kidnapping was registered in a Mumbai police station last week on a complaint lodged by her father Nadir Patel. According to the complaint, Tak and his alleged accomplice Asif Shaikh kidnapped Laila and others.