India, June 8 -- Twenty-six days after a 21-year-old woman went missing from Odisha's Keonjhar district, police on Sunday said they exhumed her remains from a forest after a man she was in a relationship with confessed to having murdered her.

Police said Sahaja Alda, 26, allegedly killed the woman suspecting she was in a relationship with another man. Ashok Nayak, a local police officer, said the woman left home on May 11 without her mobile phone. When her family checked her phone records, they found she had received the last call from Alda.

Alda initially denied any knowledge of her whereabouts as the family approached the Keonjhar police superintendent seeking intervention over alleged police inaction, as the woman remained untraceabl...