Police visit office of Aaftab Poonawala in Gurugram, search for evidence

NEW DELHI, (PTI): A Delhi Police team probing the killing of Shradha Walkar visited the office of a private firm in Gurugram where the accused Aaftab Amin Poonawala used to work, officials said on Friday.

Following a search, the police were seen carrying a plastic bag containing items recovered from bushes in the vicinity of the office. However, the officials did not reveal the contents of the bag.

The accused used to work at the private firm after he and Walkar shifted from Mumbai to the national capital, they said.

According to the police, Poonawala allegedly strangled Walkar, 27, on May 18 and sawed her body into 35 pieces which he kept in a 300-litre fridge for almost three weeks at his residence in South Delhi’s Mehrauli before dumping them across the city over several days past midnight. The saw was allegedly bought from a shop on the Mehrauli-Gurgaon Road, police sources said.

The police have so far recovered 13 body parts, which are mostly bones.

An official said a team of the Delhi Police visited Gurugram on Friday to collect evidence in connection with the probe. Searches were also conducted in the premises of the accused’s office to find out if he had thrown in the vicinity parts of her dismembered body, the murder weapon or anything related to the case which could prove to be crucial in the investigation.

Poonawala will be taken to Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand and other locations in the next couple of days to establish the sequence of events that could have led to Walkar’s killing. A Delhi court has extended the police of Poonawala for five more days.

After leaving Mumbai, Walkar and Poonawala had travelled to several locations. The police will visit these places with Poonawala to ascertain whether something had happened on those trips to trigger the murder.

Poonawala and Shraddha Walkar met each other through an online dating application. Later, they started working for the same call centre in Mumbai and fell in love. But their families objected to the relationship as they belong to different faiths, prompting the couple to move to Mehrauli earlier this year. (PTI)