New Delhi, Aug 31 (IANS): A 32-year-old man, Mohammad Ayub, was arrested for murdering girlfriend Lata after she rejected his marriage proposals, the police said on Saturday.

According to the police, Ayub had befriended Lata four years ago at a brothel in the national capital. Later, they entered into a relationship.

On August 20, the police had recovered a woman's mutilated body from the Bawana canal. The body could not be identified. However, the police pursued the case by looking around for missing persons. On Friday, it received a tip-off and arrested Ayub.

During the interrogation, Ayub disclosed that he had met Lata alias Salma at a brothel in GB road. They fell in love and Ayub wanted her to quit the brothel and marry him.

But she refused as Ayub, a street cloth vendor, was married for around 10 years and had three children with Reshma. This infuriated Ayub and he decided to eliminate her.

"On August 20, he took her out on a borrowed scooty for a stroll. Near Bawana canal, he slit her throat with a butcher's knife, kept in the scooty. To destroy the evidence, he chopped and dumped the body in the canal," said Pramod Kushwah, Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCP), Special Cell.

A case of murder and destruction of evidence had been registered against Ayub, who wanted to settle in some other city, Kushwah said.