A Muslim boy Aftab Ameen Poonawala and Shraddha Walkar a Hindu girl working in a call centre in Mumbai fell in love with each other. Aftab and Shraddha met on a dating site and later moved in together at a rented accommodation in Chhatarpur. Delhi police received a complaint from Shraddha’s father and registered an FIR on November 10. Sharadha’s parents opposed this relationship because it was inter-religious. Shradha was insisting on marriage whereas Aftab was not interested in commitment. They were in a live-in relationship for three years and had shifted to Delhi. Soon after the two shifted to Delhi, Shraddha started pressuring the man to marry her. The two quarrelled frequently and it used to get out of control.
Aftab Ameen Poonawala, strangled Shraddha Walkar on May 18 after they had a fight. He then chopped her body into 35 pieces and bought a 300-litre fridge to keep them. Over the next 18 days, he disposed of the pieces in different areas of the Mehrauli forest. The duo fell in love while working in Mumbai and came to Delhi by April-end or May first week after facing opposition from their families. While they were living in the national capital, they had an argument in mid-May over marriage, which escalated, and he strangled her. Before killing Shraddha, Aftab Amin Poonawalla had googled methods of blood cleaning and read about human anatomy after the murder.
Aftab, after searching on Google, cleaned blood stained from the floor with some chemicals and disposed of stained clothes. He shifted the body to the bathroom and bought a refrigerator from a nearby shop. Later, he chopped the body into small pieces and put them in the fridge. Aftab used to sleep every day in the same room where he had chopped the body after killing Shraddha. Aftab cleaned the fridge after disposing of the body parts.
In September, Shraddha’s friend informed her family that there was no contact with Shradhha for the last two and a half months and her mobile number was also switched off. Her family also checked her social media accounts and found no updates during this period. In November, Shraddha’s father Vikash Madan Walker, a resident of Palghar (Maharashtra), approached Mumbai police and lodged a missing person complaint. During the initial investigation, Shraddha’s last location was found in Delhi, and on the basis of this, the case was transferred to Delhi police.
Aftab, during questioning, confessed to the crime and said that they fought often as Shraddha was pressurizing him for marriage. Police also recovered some bones from Aftab’s rented flat and officials said that the efforts to recover the remaining parts of the body were on. Some remains were recovered from the forest, but it is not known if they are human remains. The knife used by the accused, who was reportedly trained as a chef, has also not been found yet.
The National Commission for Women has asked Delhi Police to conduct a fair and time-bound probe into the killing of the woman. Living in relationships has a lot wrong with them. First of all, they are driven by lust, instead of commitment. Socially too, they put a stigma on you and your family. More often than not, there is secrecy involved in such relationships, which can lead to deception and even crimes.
In another incident it took four years of investigation, finally, Ghaziabad police pulled out a man’s body buried in a neighbour’s house, and claimed to have cracked the murder with the arrest of his wife and the neighbour with whom she had an affair. The woman, Savita, had originally filed a kidnap case about her husband, Chandra Vir, in 2018. Throughout, she had been trying to deflect the blame onto his younger brother. The murder case says the woman and her lover, Arun, shot and hacked her husband, and then buried him in a pit six to seven feet deep in Arun’s house, from where the decomposed body — reduced to a skeleton — was dug out today.
After covering the pit with cement flooring, Arun continued to live in the house. The pit had been kept ready for some days before they found the chance to kill him. They kept it deep so that there was no stench. A pistol and an axe used in the murder have been found. The murder came to light on a day when another murder was reported from Ghaziabad and yet another from neighbouring Delhi. Why are love and relations turning so cruel and brutal that the partners are killing each other? From where these monsters are born?
