Meerut: Thirteen months after the dismembered body of former Merchant Navy officer Saurabh Rajput (29) was found encased in concrete inside a blue, plastic drum in Meerut, Uttar Pradesh, a local court, on Wednesday, convicted his wife, Muskan Rastogi, and her lover, Sahil Shukla.
The case had turned into a sensation across the country, given the gruesome nature of the crime. While convicting The two, the judge commented that such crimes create fear in society at large.
District Judge Arvind Kumar Mishra ruled that Rastogi and Shukla conspired to kill Rajput and concealed his dismembered body inside a blue industrial drum using concrete and sand, after examining 22 witnesses during 126 hearings, as reported by NDTV.
While the prosecution intends to seek the death penalty for both, the quantum of sentence remains to be pronounced.
Legal experts said that Muskan is unlikely to be sentenced to death as she delivered a child after being arrested. She has been spotted carrying the baby girl with her when appearing for the court hearings.
According to the prosecution, Muskan sedated her husband at their Indra Nagar home by lacing his food on March 3, 2025. Shukla arrived shortly after, and the duo stabbed Rajput to death before dismembering his body in the bathroom.
In a bid to suppress the odour of decomposition, they packed the dismembered body parts into a large blue plastic drum, filled it with a freshly mixed wet compound of sand, water, and cement, and sealed it, the probe revealed.
Muskan and Shukla fled to Himachal Pradesh the next day. Muskan used Rajput’s mobile phone to send text messages to his family members, creating an illusion that he was alive and travelling on business.
Relatives got suspicious though and visited the residence on March 17, along with local authorities. The police cut open the sealed blue drum to discover Rajput’s remains, leading to the chase and arrest of Muskan and Shukla two days later.
The prosecution presented a chain of circumstantial, technical, and physical evidence throughout the trial. Local shopkeepers testified to selling the specific blue plastic drum, cement bags, sand, cleavers, and razors to Muskan and Shukla before the murder.
Call detail records and mobile signal tower locations placed Shukla at the residence at the time of the crime and traced the duo’s joint movement to hotel stays in Shimla and Manali in Himachal. Post-mortem findings confirmed that Rajput had been stabbed to death.
