The incident occurred between Thursday night and the early hours of Friday. The Malad police who are investigating the case have confirmed that no suicide note was found and the motive behind the murder-suicide remains unclear.

A police official from the Malad police station said, “ACP Madhusudan Kurne and his wife stayed with their sons Abhijit and Amar and the Abhijit’s wife Ashwini at their third floor residence in Royal Apartment, Evershine Nagar, Malad (West). On Thursday night, the family retired to bed after dinner. On Friday morning, around 8.30 am, when the family woke up and saw that the couple had not come out of their room, they started knocking on the door of their room. However, on receiving no response, they peeped through the keyhole and saw the couple lying in a pool of blood. The family then broke down the door and notified the authorities on discovering the bodies.”

Kurne has a third son, Aniket, who lives in Kolhapur. Abhijit, the deceased, had been running a business of providing vehicles to call centres.

The police team arrived and found Kurne’s service revolver lying nearby. Kurne had been on a leave of absence since the past few weeks due to a cataract operation and had been home since then and his revolver had been kept in a cupboard. Two rounds had been fired and the couple had suffered gunshot wounds on their heads. The police believe that Abhijit shot his wife before turning the gun on himself. Surprisingly, no one in the house had heard the firing of the gun. “The reason is that the door leading to the bedroom of the deceased is a double door and quite thick. Moreover, the shots were fired from a point blank range and that might have muffled the discharge sounds to a considerable extent,” said Police Inspector Deepak Phatangare from the Malad police station.