Meerut: Muskaan Rastogi, the wife of merchant navy officer Saurabh Rajput, and her lover, Sahil Shukla, were sentenced to death by a court in Meerut on Wednesday for murdering him, dismembering the body and stuffing it into a blue plastic drum, before filling it with concrete.
The murder created a nationwide sensation in 2025 and came to be known as the “blue drum murder case”.
Muskaan and Shukla were convicted two weeks ago, with the sentence pronounced on Wednesday, as reported by NDTV.
District judge Arvind Kumar Mishra ruled that Rastogi and Shukla conspired to kill Saurabh Rajput and concealed his dismembered body inside a blue industrial drum using concrete and sand after 126 hearings and 22 witness statements.
Such crimes create fear in society at large, the judge has said while convicting them.
In the morning, Muskaan’s parents told the court that Rajput was a “very good person”, and if the guilty are sentenced to death, “we will not protest”. Muskaan’s family never met her in prison.
Muskaan sedated Rajput on March 3, 2025, at their Indra Nagar home by lacing his food, as per the police case. Her lover Shukla arrived shortly after, and the duo stabbed Rajput to death before dismembering his body in the bathroom, the prosecution said.
Seeking 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.
The two left for Himachal Pradesh the next day, and Muskaan used Rajput’s mobile phone to send text messages to his family members, creating an illusion that he was alive and travelling for business.
Suspicious relatives visited the residence on March 17 alongside local authorities. Rajput and Muskaan’s six-year-old daughter then reportedly told neighbours: “Papa is in the drum.”
The police cut open the sealed blue drum to discover Rajput’s remains, leading to the chase and arrest of Muskaan and Shukla two days later.
Throughout the trial, the prosecution presented a chain of circumstantial, technical, and physical evidence. Local shopkeepers testified to selling the specific blue plastic drum, cement bags, sand, cleavers, and razors to Rastogi and Shukla before the murder.
Call detail records and mobile signal tower locations placed Shukla at the residence during 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.
