NEW DELHI: In a gut-wrenching incident, a 27-year-old woman from Mumbai was allegedly strangled, her body chopped into 35 pieces and dumped at different locations across the national capital, the police revealed on Monday.
Accused Aaftab Amin Poonawala, 28, was in a live-in relationship with victim Shraddha Walkar. The matter came to light after the girl’s father Vikas Madan Walkar approached the Mumbai Police with a missing person complaint.
“On November 8, the Mumbai Police contacted the Delhi Police regarding the disappearance of a girl. She had gone missing from the area of the Mehrauli police station,” Additional DCP (south Delhi) Ankit Chauhan said.
Vikas told the Delhi Police that on November 14, his son was informed by his daughter’s friend that she had no contact with Shraddha for the past two-and-a-half months and her mobile phone was switched off.
After scanning CCTV footage of the nearby areas, the police detained Poonawala on Saturday.
Initially, he claimed she had left him long ago and he was unaware of her whereabouts. However, upon sustained interrogation, he admitted he killed her after a quarrel over marriage. The idea of chopping up her body came from Dexter, an American crime TV series, he added.
“Poonawala disclosed that he and the deceased were in a live-in relationship since 2019. Both hail from Mumbai. They met each other through some dating app and even had frequent fights,” the senior official said.
Since Shraddha’s family was against her inter-faith relationship, she began living with him in Mumbai about three years ago before relocating to Delhi’s Mehrauli. “They visited hill stations in March and April. Thereafter, they decided to stay in Delhi,” the police said.
On May 18, Poonawala strangled her after a heated argument, chopped her body into 35 parts, wrapped them in plastic bags, and preserved them in a new 300-litre refrigerator. The accused disposed of those body parts within the next 18 days at different locations in a forest area in the city, leaving home past midnight to do so.
Vikas was living separately with his mother and not his wife and daughter since 2016. Shraddha’s mother passed away in January 2020.
“When her mother was alive, Shraddha told her several times that Poonawala used to beat her. Fifteen days after my wife’s death, Shraddha told me the same thing over the phone,” Vikas said.