Police may take Aaftab to Himachal, U'khand to establish sequence of events

Investigators probing the Mehrauli killing case are likely to take help from other police districts in Delhi and will take accused Aaftab Amin Poonawala to locations like Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand to establish the sequence of events leading to the brutal murder of Shradha Walkar, sources said on Thursday.

The police was granted custody of Poonawala for five more days by a court in New Delhi.

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

The police also traced the garbage van in which Walkar had disposed of his blood stained clothes besides recovering an unpaid water bill of Rs 300 and food bills.

"We will talk to the owners and staffers of hotels where the couple had stayed in Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand and also make them identify Poonawala. We will also take him to the forest area to ascertain the routes taken by him while dumping the severed body parts," a source said.

The source said Poonawala had misled the investigators about the route taken by him and he will be taken back to the forest.

"We have recovered body parts from four locations in the forest area. He had used a saw to chop the body parts, which he had allegedly bought from a shop on the Mehrauli-Gurgaon road. We will also take him to that shop so that the shopkeeper can identify him," the source said.

The police is approaching other police districts for sharing of information about any decomposed body parts recovered in their districts in the last six months.

In June, a decomposed head and hand were found from the bushes in Ramlila Ground near Kalyanpuri area of east Delhi.

"The body parts were preserved. In absence of any missing complaint that could be related to those remains, the case was not solved. We will share the information and details with the south district police to see whether there is any link between the two cases," said an investigator of that case.

Twenty-eight-year-old Poonawala allegedly strangled Walkar 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.

Poonawala and Walkar met each other through an online dating app. 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. Around mid-May, the couple had an argument over marriage, which escalated and Poonawala killed her.