Currently, the most trending news is about Aftab Poonawala killing his girlfriend Shardha Walkar by chopping her into 35 pieces and scattering her body parts in the Mehrauli forest. He was arrested from Delhi. However, the story behind his arrest is very interesting. Aftab murdered Shraddha on 18th May. Trouble began for Poonawala in September when Walkar’s friend Laxman Nadar contacted her father, prompting him to approach the Manikpur police station in Vasai with a missing persons complaint. The local police initially did not file the complaint citing jurisdiction issues as Walkar had gone missing from Delhi. Walkar’s father then went to a senior police officer from Mira Bhayander Vasai Virar (MBVV) following which the local cops took suo motu cognisance of the issue and filed a missing complaint in October. Manikpur police began their investigation by recording statements of Walkar’s family members and Nadar during the course of which Poonawala’s name came up. After this, they called for call data records (CDRs) to ascertain that Walkar was with Poonawala till the couple reached Delhi from Himachal Pradesh where they went for a trip in May. “We called Poonawala from Delhi for questioning in the last week of October. He said after Walkar’s mother passed away (in 2020) she had become frustrated and picked fights with him over petty issues. He said she left him after a fight in May. He said she did not inform him where she was going. He then said she came back after a few days before leaving again, this time with all her belongings,” said a police official.

The police said, ‘It was difficult to believe Poonawala’s version because Walkar’s phone was switched off and, for two months, she did not contact her family or even her best friends whom she always turned to for help, guidance, and emotional support. Police sources said when he was allowed to go after questioning in October, Poonawala clearly felt confident. He left thinking he was playing a perfect double game: co-operating with the police in the search for his ‘dead’ live-in partner. When he was called for a second round of questioning early this month, he gave some contradictory statements. Altered, police officers stepped up surveillance but made Poonawala feel that routine questioning was over and nothing suspicious had emerged.

The report stated that the details of the gory murder began to emerge when Poonawala visited a bar in Vasai and, during a binge, described how he murdered Walkar. When Poonawala left Mumbai a day after meeting the cops on November 3, the police alerted their Delhi counterparts to keep tabs on him. The cops landed at his home on November 10 and picked him up for questioning. The technical analysis of the couple’s phones, bank accounts, and Poonawala’s explanation of why Walkar left him and did not contact anyone raised a lot of questions. Aftab transferred around 50,000 from Shradha’s account to his. And the location of her phone was Aftab’s home. The time-line narrated by Aftabs and the timeline of bank transactions, phone locations, etc found by police did not match. When the police got Shradha’s father in front of Aftab, he calmly confessed that Shradha’s dead and that he chopped her into pieces. Delhi gets 20,000 liters of water a year free. The pending water bill of Rs 300 of Aaftab’s flat proved he used a huge amount of water probably to the blood and any other physical sign of the murder. Nobody in the building had consumed so much water. The police are yet to find Sharadha’s head, the clothes she died in and her phone. Some bones were found, but none of them have matched Sharadha’s father’s DNA. Aftab would talk to the 'severed' head and sometimes even 'slap' it when he would get angry. 

The police want to have enough proof so that Aftab can get convicted in court. Now, is Aftab playing with the police, or is he telling the truth? Only time will tell. If the police do not get enough evidence against Aftab, then what happens? Will he get the death penalty? He will be taken for a narco test to get the truth out of him. To satiate this hunger and keep the TRPs going, reporters are barging into the crime scene just to get visuals of the fridge where Shraddha’s body parts were allegedly stuffed or the room where the macabre crime took place. Camera crew are in the jungle where the police are carrying out a search operation to find the victim’s mortal remains. The crime scene is also being recreated inside studios to show how accused Aftab Amin Poonawalla may have “slaughtered the woman, bit by bit, using a saw”.

The grisly crime has also become a source of entertainment as well as anti-Muslim hatred with many imbrute memes doing the rounds on the internet.

Tags

• Shardha Walkar
• Aftab Poonawala
• Murder
• Confess

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