Delhi Police on Monday claimed to have solved the gruesome murder case of a girl who had been chopped into 35 pieces by her boyfriend. The police arrested the man on Saturday.
According to police, Shraddha Madaan’s boyfriend, Aftab Amin Poonawala, first strangled her before chopping her into pieces. He then preserved Shraddha’s dismembered body parts in a refrigerator before disposing of them in Delhi’s Mehrauli jungle.
The police said that Sharddha was insisting on Aftab for marriage, but he refused. The couple would often fight over the issue.
The couple was staying in Delhi’s Mehrauli in rented accommodation after coming from Mumbai, early this year.
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Police said Shraddha and Aftab befriended each other in Mumbai while they were working in a call centre of a multinational company. Aftab had earlier worked as a chef too.
When their relationship was not accepted by their respective families, Shraddha and Aftab decided to move to Delhi. While Shraddha’s parents did not speak to her in the initial days, they started connecting with her over the phone.
However, for the past few days, Shraddha’s parents could not connect with her. They found that her phone was unreachable. Worried parents came to Delhi and approached the local police.
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On November 8, her father, Vikas Madaan, registered a missing persons FIR for her at Mehrauli police station.
After registering an FIR, the police started the investigation. They first went to the house where Sharddha and Aftab used to live in rented accommodation. The house was locked, and Aftab was unavailable. With the help of technical surveillance, the police managed to arrest Aftab on Saturday.
During interrogation, Aftab told police that he killed Shraddha on May 18. “First he strangled her to death and then chopped her body parts into 35 pieces. To evade suspicion, he kept the body parts in the refrigerator and started disposing of them one by one,” he told the investigators.
He chose the midnight hours and Mehrauli jungles to dispose of the body. He would keep dumping the body parts for at least 20 days, the police said.
“Every night at 2 am, he would take one part of the body to dispose of in the jungle. That kept happening for 20 days,” said a police officer.
On Monday, police took Aftab to the spot to recover the body parts. The investigation into the case is on.