NEW DELHI: The Delhi Police has arrested an elderly man, absconding for nearly four decades, for allegedly murdering his wife in east Delhi in 1986, officials said on Thursday.
The accused, Chandra Shekhar Prasad, a native of Nalanda in Bihar, had been on the run since the incident, frequently changing locations across Punjab, Bihar, Haryana and Delhi to evade arrest, police said. Prasad had come to Delhi in 1969 and worked as a composer with a newspaper. He married the deceased in 1971 and the couple lived in the Shakarpur area.
According to police, on October 19, 1986, Prasad allegedly killed his wife by crushing her head with bricks, driven by suspicion of an extramarital affair. During the incident, the accused, along with his accomplices, allegedly held the domestic help at gunpoint.
Investigators said tracing the accused was particularly challenging due to the lack of technological resources at the time. “Identifying the accused posed a major challenge, as he was around 40 years old at the time of the incident and is now approximately 84 years old. There were no digital court records, Aadhaar data, mobile trails or photographs available then,” a senior police officer said.
During the investigation, police found that the accused’s children were settled in Delhi and Bihar. Suspected mobile numbers linked to them were discreetly obtained and placed under surveillance.
Deputy Commissioner of Police (Crime) Sanjeev Kumar Yadav said sustained efforts, including field verification at Prasad’s native village in Nalanda, confirmed that he was alive and occasionally visited during religious and family events. Based on this, surveillance was intensified and his movements were tracked. Police eventually traced him to northwest Delhi.
A trap was laid on Wednesday, following which Prasad was apprehended from a storeroom of a factory in Nangli Poona in the Alipur area, where he had been living under a false identity, the officer said.