Kanpur, Oct. 20 -- The blue drum has become the chilling symbol of two murder cases separated by nearly seven years. Last week, a Meerut court sentenced Muskan Rastogi and her lover Sahil Shukla to death for killing Muskan's husband, hiding his body in a blue plastic drum and attempting to dispose of it. In Kanpur, a strikingly similar case dates back to December 2019, when Wasim Ahmad, 32, was allegedly murdered and his body stuffed into a drum in a locked rented room in Saadh, Ghatampur. The accused, Chandni, a transgender person who was in a relationship with Wasim, remains at large. The Kanpur case appears to predate the Meerut murder as an instance of a body being concealed in a blue drum, although available records do not establish whether it was the first such case. What links the two is the use of an ordinary household 100-litre container to conceal a killing, and the contrast between the death sentence handed down in Meerut and the long wait for justice in Wasim's case. Wasim was allegedly hacked to death by Chandni. His body was pushed headfirst into a 100-litre plastic drum, with the legs protruding, and left inside the locked room. It was discovered nearly 20 days later, when a foul smell prompted the landlord, Zakir Hussain, to alert the police. A bloodstained cleaver was recovered from the room. Chandni had been living in a rented room in Zakir's house in Saadh since around September 2018. Wasim worked in Surat and would return to Kanpur from time to time to stay with Chandni. He also had a family in Jajmau, where his wife and two children lived. Accounts from the time suggested that the relationship had become strained after a third person entered the picture. Chandni was reportedly deeply in love with Wasim, but tensions had been building between them before the murder. The precise circumstances that led to the killing have not been established in the available account of the case. According to Zakir, Chandni left about 20 days before the body was discovered, saying Wasim had gone out of town. Chandni locked the room, handed the key to the landlord and said they would return after a few days. The household belongings had also been sold to a scrap dealer before the departure. People in the locality later recalled that Chandni had said Wasim had "gone to Allah." They had taken the remark as a joke at the time. The discovery of the body gave those words a far more disturbing significance, Zakir said. Ravi Srivastava, the inspector who handled the case at the time, said Chandni had been on the run despite searches at several places. "Chandni vanished into thin air. We searched every possible place, but could not find them. I was later transferred," he said. Ravindra Kumar Singh, who handled the case as SHO Saadh in 2021, said police teams travelled to several states, but Chandni appears to have planned the crime meticulously and covered their tracks well. "Our teams returned empty-handed," he said. Several IOs have handled the case since then, but Chandni has not been arrested. The police have filed a final report twice, while Wasim's family continues to wait for the accused to be traced and brought to justice. His wife, who had been pursuing the case, has since moved away from Jajmau....