The Pudur Police on Tuesday took custody of Provat Das, a native of Alipurduar, West Bengal, the prime suspect in the double murder of a woman and a child at Attapadi in Palakkad. The police team, which had travelled to West Bengal, traced and held him.

Provat has confessed to the crime during interrogation and revealed that the woman was not his wife, neither was the child his. She was staying with him only for the past two months or so, police said. The exact motive behind the killing is still being ascertained.

"The interrogation is underway to complete the sequence of events," police added.

Meanwhile, the autopsy report has revealed that the accused inflicted multiple chop wounds to woman’s head before chopping her head off with a heavy weapon. The child was strangled, and the head was severed. Both deaths happened within a short span of time.

Police said that the accused may have acted in an uncontrollable fit of rage and executed the killings in a brutal manner. Although he has confessed, he hasn’t told cops why he killed them. Forensic surgeons associated with the autopsy said that the findings have to be matched with his statements to find out if the child was inflicted with any other physical wounds. The police initially suspected that the child may have been suffocated to death in water, the autopsy indicated choking with bare hands.

The decapitated bodies of the woman and child, stuffed into sacks, were recovered from the Bhavani River on Sunday. The preliminary probe revealed that the bodies belonged to an Assamese woman and her child. A nursery supervisor helped police identify the victims.

The suspect and the woman, who was his partner, had worked at the nursery after the supervisor brought them for employment. Police have contacted the woman's relatives in Assam and plan to bring them to Kerala for confirmation, Thrissur Commissioner Nakul Rajendra Deshmukh, who is presently holding additional charge of the Palakkad Rural SP, told Onmanorama.