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A post-mortem examination has revealed that a 57-year-old Fiji woman whose badly burnt body was discovered in a cassava patch in Suva this morning died of strangulation.
Police spokesman Atu Sokomuri said police were now treating the case as murder.
Two people were in police custody and being questioned while the house that the woman Dawashwari Devi was renting with her son Rajnesh Prasad, daughter-in-law Ashni Chand and their two children, had been declared a crime scene and placed under police guard.
Sokomuri said police had asked the family to vacate the house which is now the scene of police investigations.
Devi’s charred remains were discovered in a cassava plantation metres from her Toorak home after she was last seen in the house at 2am today.
Her son and daughter-in-law realised Devi was not in the house when they discovered she was not in her room.
“We started the search and later found her a few metres from the house lying in the cassava patch all burnt,” daughter-in-law Ashni Chand told FijiLive earlier today.
Devi was a patient of the Saint Giles psychiatric hospital in 2001 while suffering from depression and was discharged eight months later and had been doing well, Chand said.
“My mother-in-law never left the house without telling us but I don’t know why she did this time,” she said.
