Delhi Murder Case: Police to take Aftab Poonawalla to places he visited with Shraddha Walkar

Image courtesy: ANI

New Delhi: In order to determine the sequence of events leading to the brutal murder of Shraddha Walkar, investigators looking into the Mehrauli killing case are likely to enlist the assistance of other police districts in Delhi and will take the accused, Aaftab Amin Poonawala, to places like Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, sources said on Thursday, November 17, 2022. A court here granted police custody of Poonawala for an additional five days. The police will accompany Poonawala to the places Walkar and Poonawala visited after leaving Mumbai to see if anything occurred during those trips that led to the murder.

In addition to recovering a Rs 300 unpaid water bill and food bills, the police have also located the garbage van where Poonawala had dumped his blood-stained clothes.

The source said, "We will take him to the forest area to ascertain the routes taken by him while dumping the severed body parts. We will also talk to the owners and staff members of hotels where the couple had stayed in Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand and also make them identify Poonawala."

According to the source, Poonawala will be returned to the forest because he misled the investigators about his path.

"We have recovered body parts from four locations in the forest area. He had used a saw to chop the body parts, which he had allegedly bought from a shop on the Mehrauli-Gurgaon road. We will also take him to that shop so that the shopkeeper can identify him," the source said.

The police are approaching other police districts for sharing of information about any decomposed body parts recovered in their districts in the last six months. In June, a decomposed head and hand were found from the bushes in Ramlila Ground near Kalyanpuri area of east Delhi.

"The body parts were preserved. In absence of any missing complaint that could be related to those remains, the case was not solved. We will share the information and details with the south district police to see whether there is any link between the two cases," said an investigator of that case.

Twenty-eight-year-old Poonawala allegedly strangled Walkar and sawed her body into 35 pieces which he kept in a 300-litre fridge for almost three weeks at his residence in South Delhi's Mehrauli before dumping them across the city over several days past midnight.

Poonawala and Walkar met each other through an online dating app. Later, they started working for the same call centre in Mumbai and fell in love.

But their families objected to the relationship as they belong to different faiths, prompting the couple to move to Mehrauli earlier this year. Around mid-May, the couple had an argument over marriage, which escalated and Poonawala killed her.