New Delhi: As details of Shraddha Walkar’s grisly murder keep getting reported, the tale is getting murkier and public anger against the culprit, Aftab Poonawala, is building up.
So, how did the man who allegedly killed his live-in partner Shraddha Walkar and cut her into pieces that he scattered in a jungle six months ago, finally get arrested for murder? Police said he’d built a trail of Instagram chats and bank payments to project that she’d left on her own, but that trail led to him instead, NDTV reported.
It seems the man walked into his own trap by telling lies that did not add up.
At first, after Shraddha Walkar’s father went to the police in Vasai near Mumbai last month, Aftab Poonawala was called for questioning on October 26. He told the cops that she had left their rented flat in Chhatarpur in Delhi’s Mehrauli area after a quarrel on May 22.
It was later discovered that he had already murdered her four days before that, it was later discovered. This was barely two weeks after they’d moved to Delhi. He told the cops that she’d taken only her mobile phone, leaving clothes and other belongings behind. So, investigators tracked the phone activity, call details and signal location.
They found that between May 22 and 26, Rs 54,000 had been transferred from Shraddha Walkar’s account to Aftab Poonawala’s, using the banking app on her phone. The location was Chhatarpur in Mehrauli, near where they used to stay together. This heightened suspicions as he’d told the police that he wasn’t in touch with her “ever since she left on May 22”.
He was again called for questioning early this month, when he told the police he’d made the bank transfers as he had her phone and app passwords, the report said, adding that he’d been paying her credit card bills, too, so that bank officials won’t go to her Mumbai address.
The cops, meanwhile, found that he’d used her Instagram account to chat with her friends. One of the chats, of May 31, showed the phone’s location to be Mehrauli again, sources said. Officers from Vasai’s Manikpur police station then contacted Delhi Police. They detained him and asked the question that cracked the case: If she had left him on May 22, how was her location still Mehrauli? Aftab Poonawala then broke down and narrated the horrifying details, police sources told NDTV.
