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Durgapur: A manager in a nationalised bank and his wife were arrested in Durgapur on Thursday after a woman's decomposed and charred body was found in a suitcase in their home.

Rajiv Kumar, 38, is the manager of State Bank of India's Mejia branch in Bankura while his wife Manisha is an assistant manager in the same bank's New Township branch in Durgapur.

The murdered woman, 28-year-old Shilpa Agarwal, was a contractual employee in Kumar's branch. Her naked, twisted and charred body, tied with a rope, was found in a suitcase inside the storeroom of the Kumars' fourth-floor flat in a multi-storey building, the police said.

"We have started a murder case as the body was recovered from their flat in Benachity," Abhishek Modi, deputy commissioner of police (east), Asansol Durgapur Police Commissionerate, said.

Agarwal's family had lodged a missing diary with Mejia police station on February 10. Agarwal, a resident of Mejia, had visited her aunt's home in Asansol town last Friday and left for Durgapur to meet a friend, they said in the complaint. When she didn't return home the next day, they approached the police.

"Her family members visited Kumar to tell him she was missing because they knew she had a cordial relationship with him," an officer at Durgapur police station said. "When he didn't let them enter his flat, they became suspicious and alerted us. We raided his home and found the body."

Agarwal's brother Sandip and cousin Tinku corroborated this while speaking to this correspondent.

A team of officers from Mejia and Durgapur police stations raided the flat around 6am on Thursday.

Kumar had allegedly tried to prevent the cops from entering the flat. "When we started interrogating him about the woman, he started sweating and appeared nervous," the officer said.

A stench prompted the cops to search the flat. "Officers found the body in the suitcase."

Agarwal had joined the bank as a customer care executive on contract six months ago. Kumar had a role in her recruitment, the police quoted her family members as saying.

"We are looking into two things.... Kumar had borrowed Rs 1 lakh from the woman to invest in the stock market. She had asked him to repay it," an investigating officer said. "Also, we are trying to find out if Kumar had a relationship with her that turned sour."

The police quoted Kumar as saying that Agarwal had turned up at his flat on February 10 when his wife was out of town on work. "Kumar told us that she stayed the night in his flat and that he found her hanging from the ceiling fan the next morning. He claimed to have become so nervous that he hid her body in the fridge and went to work on Monday," the officer said. "Before his wife returned that night, he stuffed the body into the suitcase."

The police doubt Kumar's version because Agarwal's body bore several injury and cut marks. "We suspect she was also throttled. We are also looking into his wife's role," the officer said.

The police are probing a call to Durgapur police station on Thursday morning by a woman who said she knew of a body in a suitcase at Rupali Apartment in Benachity. The call apparently came just when the police were about to raid Kumar's flat.