June 27: The naked, decomposed body of a 28-year-old woman software engineer was found last evening on Goa’s Candolim beach, with police suspecting foul play.

Meghna Subhedar, who was recently divorced, worked with infotech firm Genesis in Bangalore. She had gone missing from Mumbai on April 10 while on her way to hometown Korba in Chhattisgarh.

Goa police sources said the initial post-mortem suggested foul play and once the final post-mortem report was received, a case of accidental death or murder would be registered. They added that Meghna might have died four days ago.

Meghna had called her family on the evening of April 10 saying she had arrived in Mumbai by flight and would soon be boarding the Geetanjali Express from the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST).

“During the conversation, she claimed to have reached the station but telephone records suggest she was in suburban Andheri. She probably went directly to Goa straight from the airport, which is near Andheri,” an officer said at the CST railway police sta tion where a missing persons complaint was filed on April 11.

Police investigations later revealed that on April 14, she had withdrawn money from an ATM in Margao, south Goa. After this, a lookout notice was sent to all the police stations in Goa, but no clues emerged.

Meghna’s parents, both of them doctors, have reached Goa. They said the pictures from the ATM camera suggested Meghna was extremely frightened. The parents think she was either being blackmailed or had been kidnapped.

Allegations of a sex racket involving powerful people in Goa surfaced earlier this year after the half-naked body a 15-year-old British girl, Scarlett Keeling, was found on the state’s Anjuna beach in February amid suspicion that she was raped and murdered.

Meghna divorced her husband, who lives in Nagpur, a few months ago. Her parents said she had been a little depressed following the divorcebefore she went missing.

“The Calangute police got in touch with us about the discovery of a woman’s body on the beach. We told her parents about it and they immediately rushed to Goa. They have identified the body as Meghna’s,” the CST officer said.

Meghna’s father, Dr Mohan Subhedar, was chief medical officer with the National Thermal Power Corporation and now runs a clinic in Korba, Chhattisgarh police said. Her mother, Dr Anjali Subhedar, is a gynaecologist.