Bhubaneswar, June 14: Navi Mumbai police arrested two Odia youths last night from Kharavela Nagar in Bhubaneswar in connection with a murder case.

Ramesh Jena, 28, and Srikant Jena, 29, both hailing from Kendrapara district, are accused of killing one Shyamsundar Sethi, alias Pupuna, also a native of Kendrapara, in Navi Mumbai on May 31. They killed Shyamsundar following an altercation over a love affair.

While Ramesh was from Rajnagar area of Kendrapara, Srikant was from Pattamundai. The victim also belonged to Pattamundai.

The police said the accused and the victim worked as plumbers in Navi Mumbai, where they stayed in Sector 19 area on Ulwe Road under the N.R.I. Coastal police station. They had frequent fights over Srikant’s affair with a girl from Kendrapara.

The police got to know of the murder after Pabitra Kumar Dhal, the contractor who had employed them, informed them. The three of them earlier worked in Rajasthan and even in those days, Srikant used to call the girl, whose name is being kept a secret by the police, using Shyamsundar’s mobile phone. However, Shyamsundar allegedly told the girl nasty things about Srikant, following which she broke up with him and got married elsewhere.

Though Srikant and Ramesh returned to Bhubaneswar after the girl’s marriage, they continued to nurse a grudge against Shyamsundar who had moved to Navi Mumbai. By a quirk of fate, the accused also got a job in Navi Mumbai about a month ago through Pabitra.

When the accused found that Shyamsundar was working in Navi Mumbai, they began quarrelling with him over Srikant’s affair, which had gone sour. Sources said on the night on May 31, Srikant and Ramesh had a major fight with Shyamsundar. During the altercation, they slit his throat with an axe and then tried to disfigure his face by smashing his head with a hammer.

Both the accused then fled Mumbai and returned to Bhubaneswar via Lucknow and some cities in Madhya Pradesh. Police have registered a case under sections 302 (murder) and 34 (acts done by several people) of the Indian Penal Code and seized the axe and hammer from the spot.

“We kept tracking the phone calls and came to know they were in Bhubaneswar,” said Narayan Deorukhkar, the police sub-inspector from Navi Mumbai, who led the team that conducted the raid.