Tue 15 November 2022:
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) here on Tuesday demanded justice for Shradhha Walkar, the 27-year-old woman from Palghar who was killed and chopped into pieces by her live-in partner in New Delhi.
Alleging it to be an instance of ‘love-jihad’, BJP leader Ram Kadam led a protest demonstration here seeking justice for the victim and her family.
A large number of BJP women activists also joined the action raising slogans in favour of the victim and asking for stringent punishment to the accused, Aftab Ameen Poonawala.
Shradhha Walkar.
Poonawala was arrested by the Delhi Police on November 12.
The couple was in a relationship since 2019, but after her family objected to their liaison, Shraddha left home and started living with Poonawala in Naigaon town in Palghar.
It was sometime in April that the duo had gone to live in Delhi where their relations soured after Shraddha insisted on marrying Poonawala.
The entire probe started only after the victim’s childhood friend, Laxman Nadar, alerted her family in September that she had suddenly gone incommunicado for over two-three months, and her alarmed father Vikas Walkar complained to the Palghar Police.
The police teams of the two states are probing the diabolic killing and have seized the electronic gadgets of Poonawala like mobiles and laptops to get to the root of the sensational crime.
The Delhi Police have taken Poonawala to the spots where he claimed to have dumped Shraddha’s body parts and are trying to recover the weapon, purportedly a knife, that was used to kill her.
Aftab Ameen Poonawala.
Meanwhile, a distraught Vikas Walkar has demanded the hangman’s noose for Poonawala who has confessed to the crime of killing his daughter, as the incident numbed the people of Vasai industrial town in Palghar, an hour’s drive north of Mumbai.
Here are 10 latest developments in the case:
The Delhi police today took Aftab to the forest area, where he allegedly threw Shraddha’s body parts. The search operation went on for three hours and at least 10 body parts have been recovered.
The victim’s father, Vikas Walkar, on Tuesday demanded a death penalty for 28-year-old Aftab Ameen Poonawala, while also suspecting a “love jihad” angle behind the incident.
Aftab and Shraddha met on the dating app “Bumble” while both were working in Mumbai. The police may ask the dating app for details of his profile to find out whether he brought more women home while he had Shraddha’s body parts in the apartment and whether any of them were a trigger for the murder.
The couple fought frequently as Shraddha insisted on marriage. But on May 18, their fight escalated and Aftab “sat on Shraddha’s chest and strangled her”, sources said. He has allegedly told the police he used “sulphur hypochlorite” to clean up the blood after chopping Shraddha Walkar’s body.
Sources said Aftab used to sleep in the same room where he had chopped the victim’s body. He reportedly used to see the face after keeping it in the fridge and also cleaned the fridge after disposing the body parts.
The police also took Aftab to the shop from where he claimed to have bought the tools to cut up Shraddha’s body. CCTV footage of that day is no longer available, though Aftab claimed he bought the knife used in the crime from the shop, along with garbage bags to dispose off the body parts.
The neighbours say Aftab would come to his house with multiple other women, even after five months of allegedly murdering his live-in partner. They added that the couple used to stay aloof, and didn’t mingle with people around. They claim they saw multiple women coming to his house, even as recently as in October.
Aftab brought another woman to his apartment days after the murder, the police said. He brought the woman home frequently, while remains of Shraddha’s body were still in the apartment.
The police are now probing if he had rented a flat in Delhi’s Chhatarpur area as part of a conspiracy to kill the victim. The flat was rented just days before the murder.
Aftab Ameen Poonawala murdered her on May 18, bought a 300-litre fridge to keep her body the next day, got a weapon the same day and then chopped her body into 35 pieces and scattered them in a forest late at night every day for 18 days.
SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
FOLLOW INDEPENDENT PRESS:
TWITTER (CLICK HERE)
https://twitter.com/IpIndependent
FACEBOOK (CLICK HERE)
https://web.facebook.com/ipindependent
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
