Durgapur: Police on Friday claimed arrested banker Rajiv Kumar had admitted to suffocating colleague Shilpa Agarwal with a pillow and strangling her with a scarf on Sunday morning.

"During our interrogation, he admitted to his crime. She injured her head after banging against a chest of drawers kept beside the bed," an officer of Durgapur police station said.

He told cops that he had kept the 28-year-old woman's body in the fridge and sellotaped its door.

Agarwal's decomposed, naked and twisted body tied with a rope was found in a suitcase kept in the storeroom of Kumar's flat in a multi-storey building in Durgapur's Benachity on Thursday.

Kumar had sex with Agarwal before murdering her, which is why the body was naked, the police claimed. "He told us that he killed her because she had been forcing him to marry her. He had another rented flat in Raniganj where he used to meet Agarwal regularly," the officer said.

After his arrest on Thursday, Kumar, the manager of State Bank of India's Mejia branch in Bankura, had claimed Agarwal had committed suicide.

The police on Friday clarified that the body wasn't charred but had injury marks on the head. The police claimed Kumar's wife Manisha, a SBI manager at Durgapur's Fuljhore branch, had admitted that she knew of the body kept in their flat.

She had called up the police on Thursday morning and alerted them about the body, an officer said.Kumar claimed he had repaid the Rs 1 lakh he had borrowed from Agarwal, the police said. "We will cross-check his bank statement," the officer said.