The Meghalaya police on Monday afternoon said that 24-year-old Sonam Raghuvanshi is being considered one of the prime suspects in the murder of her newlywed husband Raja Raghuvanshi, along with 21-year-old Raj Kushwaha, who was arrested from Indore in a raid last night. A total of four people have been arrested in the case so far, while a Meghalaya police team is on its way to Uttar Pradesh’s Ghazipur to arrest Sonam.

Superintendent of Police, East Khasi Hills, Vivek Syiem, said that Raj Kushwaha, who is suspected to have been in a relationship with Sonam, was the “handler” of the other three accused, who are suspected to be the assailants who carried out the murder in Meghalaya’s Sohra. Raj, police said, was never in Meghalaya himself.

He said that Sonam’s involvement in planning the crime “cannot be ruled out” and that police are in the process of securing transit remand to bring her to Meghalaya for interrogation.

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The other two arrested last night are Vishal Singh Chauham (22), who was also picked up from Indore, and Akash Rajput (19), who was arrested from Lalitpur in Uttar Pradesh. A fourth individual, Anand Singh Kurmi (23), was arrested around noon from Madhya Pradesh’s Sagar district on Monday.

Syiem said that two teams of the Meghalaya police travelled to Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh on Sunday and conducted raids in these location along with local police to make these arrests, and that a third team is on the way to Uttar Pradesh’s Ghazipur district where Sonam is in the custody of local police after “surrendering” Sunday night.

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Asked by reporters whether a relationship between the two prime accused appears to be the primary motive behind the crime, he said, “If we connect the dots, the preliminary investigation will show that that’s how the whole motive and crime was unearthed. Because when we had connected the dots, it places Raj Kushwaha and Sonam at the centre, and when they come here, that will be confirmed. At this juncture, I will not be able to say what exactly is the motive, but it indicates towards that.”

These arrests come more than two weeks after the couple, who had gotten married last month in Indore, went “missing” on May 23 while travelling in Meghalaya for their honeymoon. Syiem said that the case had first been treated as one of missing tourists and that it was only after Raja’s body was recovered from deep in a gorge below Wei Sawdong falls last Monday that it turned into a murder investigation.

The three assailants, he said, carried out the murder on May 23 and left the state that day itself. The autopsy carried out in NEIGRIHMS Shillong showed that the deceased had two sharp cuts on his head, one from the front and the other from behind.

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“These people committed the crime on May 23 and left this place the same day. At that time, we didn’t know it was murder. At that time, we were looking for them as tourists who were lost. It was still a missing persons’ report. No body had been found. A body was found only on June 2 and that’s when an SIT was formed and the investigation started,” he said, adding that the biggest challenge in the case had been finding the body itself given the inclement weather conditions the region had been experiencing at the time of the searches and the challenging terrain.

“The major challenge was finding the body. The moment the search started, torrential rains started and the terrain we have there is also not easy. To top it off, we probably need more robust record-keeping and CCTV coverage. We didn’t have any of that, so that was very challenging,” he said.