"Shraddha is no more.” These were the first words of Aftab Amin Poonawala when the Delhi Police gave Shraddha Walkar’s father Vikas Walkar a chance to ask anything from him.
“I asked him where is Shraddha and when he uttered those words, I was shocked and felt the ground slipping beneath my feet. I didn’t ask him anything else,” Vikas said.
Delhi every day bears witness to umpteen number of crimes, some brutal, yet, this particular barbaric murder of 27-year-old Shraddha has literally shaken the soul of every person down to the core.
In one of the rarest gut-churning incidents, Shraddha Walkar, a Mumbai-suburb resident, was allegedly strangled, her body sliced into several pieces, and then dumped at different locations of a forest area in south Delhi and Gurugram by her live-in partner, Aftab Amin Poonawala. The accused was arrested by the police.
Missing daughter
The case that shook the country came to light on November 14 but Vikas Walkar’s search for her missing daughter had already begun in October. One of Shraddha’s friends had alerted her father Vikas about Shraddha not responding to her messages and calls for some months.
It was Vikas Walkar, who then first approached the Mumbai Police on October 6, frantically searching for his daughter, and later came to know that she was residing in Delhi with her live-in partner Aftab Amin Poonawala.
The Mumbai Police lodged the first missing complaint on October 10 after it found that Shraddha had been inactive on her all social media accounts. Aftab too was called to Mumbai and questioned by the police on October 26. However, he did not reveal anything then.
Searching Shraddha, the Mumbai Police then reached Mehrauli police station in Delhi on November 9 and told them about Shraddha, who was residing at Chattarpur Pahadi in south Delhi. On November 10, the Delhi Police registered an FIR under relevant sections of law and began searching for her. Poonawala was traced and detained and when put to sustained interrogation, he revealed all the horrific details of the barbaric crime that he had committed six months back on May 18.
When Aftab was arrested by the police, initially he claimed that Shraddha had left him on May 22 and he was unaware of her whereabouts. However, upon sustained interrogation, he admitted he killed her after a quarrel over marriage.
Fan of 'Dexter', googled to dispose off body
After killing his live-in partner, Aftab researched and read about the ways of disposing of a body on the internet. To hide the crime, it was necessary to hide the body. In order to do that he first chopped the body in several pieces for a period of two days i.e. May 19-20.
But even chopping a human body isn’t an easy task. So, Aftab first kept Shraddha’s body in the bathroom, under the shower, so that it decomposes and slicing it becomes easy.
It took accused Poonawala several months, starting from May 18 when he killed his partner, to gradually dispose of all the body parts in the forest area of south Delhi and Gurugram in Haryana. For these six months, Poonawala took several precautions so that the brutal crime committed by him did not surface in the open.
Night after night, around 2 am, he used to leave his flat, carrying a plastic bag containing a body part of the victim woman, throw it at an abandoned place and return back by 4 am before morning walkers start venturing out.
During all that time, the head of the victim woman was preserved by the accused in a refrigerator and he even told the cops that he used to look at it every day. Aftab Poonawala was inspired by the American crime show ‘Dexter’, which tells the story of a man with homicidal tendencies who secretly lived a double life as a forensic technician during the day and a vigilante serial killer at night.
Having sufficient reasons which warranted deeper investigation, the accused was arrested on November 12 and taken on five days’ police custody remand which was further extended for another five days on November 17.
After November 12, began the most intense search operation to locate the chopped body parts of Shraddha in the capital city. For the past seven days, the police have been continuously recovering body parts and sending them for forensic examination.
Pertinent to mention, apart from Aftab’s confession, the police are not having the most crucial evidence -- the murder weapon -- to prove the extent of the crime in a court of law. Even the skull of the victim was untraceable, until Sunday (November 20).
Who was Shraddha Walkar?
Shraddha Walkar was all that many young women want to be – bold, confident, and independent.
With the Instagram username – That Short Rebel – Shraddha had a life that showed glimpses of it too. She had, after all, severed ties with her parents to enter into a relationship with a man of another faith. But Walkar was also the girl-next-door with dreams, one who wanted to pursue a career, get married to a man she fell in love with many other things.
Somewhere on the way, things started to get awry and then they had a gruesome end, her body was sawed into several pieces and strewn around the city over several months. Few who knew Shraddha or her live-in partner, 28-year-old Aftab, could see what was coming. Shraddha herself didn’t, for sure. Days before she was allegedly murdered by Aftab, she had talked to friends about giving the strained relationship the last chance.
While friends recall how she confided in them about Aftab’s violent behaviour and that she often bore bruises, her estranged family had no idea about her struggles. “In 2018, our daughter used to work at a call centre where Aftab Amin Poonawala was also working. After 8-9 months, we learnt that she is in a relationship with Poonawala. Shraddha had told her mother in 2019 that she wishes to stay with Poonawala in a live-in relationship for which both me and my wife refused, as I am a Hindu and the boy was a Muslim,” her father, Vikas Madan Walkar, told the police in his written complaint.
Yet, Shraddha didn’t leave his side and continued her relationship with Aftab. She was indeed a rebellious and independent woman who never hesitated to take bold decisions in her life. “I am 25 and independent to take decisions,” Shraddha told her parents and went to stay with her lover Aftab.
Vikas Walkar separated from his wife in 2016 and Shraddha’s mother died in January 2020.
When her mother was alive, Shraddha told her several times that Aftab used to beat her. Days after my wife’s death, Shraddha told me the same over the phone,” Vikas said.
Toxic relationship
Before being killed on May 18, Shraddha was a victim of severe domestic violence in her toxic relationship. Cops came across the chats between Shraddha and her friends, which revealed a
pattern of abuse by Aftab that ended up in her murder.
“I won’t be able to make it from all the beating yesterday... I guess my blood pressure is low and body hurts,” Shraddha had written in a WhatsApp chat with her co-worker two years ago, when she along with Aftab lived together in their hometown Vasai near Mumbai.
“I don’t have the energy to get off the bed. Apologies for the trouble I have caused to you and the way it impacted work,” she had told her colleague while attaching a photo of her with injury marks.
The Delhi Police teams investigating this murder case have also reached Mumbai and recorded statements of four persons in Maharashtra’s Palghar. Of the four, two were those who had helped Shraddha when she was assaulted by Aftab in 2020.
The New Indian Express contacted one of the people named Rahul Ray and asked him about that particular day. “Shraddha was known to one of my friends Godwin and I did not directly know her. On that day two years back, we took her first to a doctor as she had bruises over her face and neck. Her one side of the face had turned black and blue,” Ray told this newspaper.
Ray, a driver by profession, further said he was driving the car while Shraddha was sitting in the backseat. “I didn’t know her directly but I hear the conversation she was having with Godwin. Shraddha was saying that she had been badly beaten by her partner,” he said.
Notably, in December last year as well, Shraddha was admitted to a private hospital in Vasai. The doctor, as per his report, said that when she came to her, there were “only internal injuries”.
She had severe back pain, nausea, neck pain, difficulty in the movement of the neck, and tingling and numbness in the lower limb.
The clever Mehrauli monster
Skilled at using knives, Aftab Amin Poonawala was a trained chef and he used the sharp edges in the most grotesque way possible. Most people known to the 28-year-old speak of him as a cool and collected person. And yet Shraddha Walkar saw a side on the other extreme.
He was prone to severe bursts of anger. According to the officials who are privy to the probe, Aaftab is not mentally abnormal but seems to have anger management issues. A doctor who had treated him for a wound on his arm on May 19, just a day after he cut up Shraddha’s body in more than two dozen pieces, said, “When I asked him how he sustained the injury, he said he hurt himself while cutting fruits. I did not doubt him, as it was a small clean knife cut.”
The doctor, who is a surgeon by profession and the only one in the area, stays just 100 metres from Aaftab’s house. “He looked very confident. He was talking to me in English and said that he belonged to Mumbai. He told me that he came to Delhi because there are good opportunities in the IT sector here,” the doctor said, adding he sensed a dominating attitude in him.
Sources privy to the probe have time and again said that Aftab, during the interrogation, has been deceptive in nature and has several times tried to mislead the interrogators. The cops feel that the woman’s murder was not done in a fit of rage, but, with foolproof planning. “He has an answer to every question. Speaks very well in English,” sources said.
Aftab has also revealed that he planned to kill Shraddha soon after they had arrived in Delhi on May 8.
“After their arrival in Delhi, the couple stayed at a Hotel in Paharganj for a week and then shifted to Chattarpur on May 15. They were having frequent fights and Aftab is confessing that he would have killed her 10 days back but he hesitated as Shraddha was emotional,” the source said.
Narco test imperative
Aftab will most likely undergo a narco test on Monday, November 21 at Dr Baba Saheb Ambedkar Hospital in Delhi. A local court had earlier given permission for the narco test over the application filed by the Delhi Police, saying that accused Aftab was not cooperating in the ongoing investigation.
Notably, as Poonawala’s police custody period is set to end on Tuesday, the police have now only three days left to get the test conducted.
Heinous murders
A week after the horror, one more similar murder of an ex-Navy officer was reported in Bengal’s Baruipur on Sunday. His son has admitted to killing the retired officer after a fight over money for college expenses. Gruesome murders in relationships that made news in the capital:
Niranjani Pillai
Naina Sahni
Anupama Gulati