As Chilling Details Unravel In Shraddha Case, A Look At Some Grisly Murders That Shook India
The Shraddha murder case has brought back memories of other gruesome killings in the past such as the Naina Sahni case, the Nithari killings as well as the Anupama Gulati murder.
New Delhi: The purported details pertaining to the murder of Shraddha Walkar, a call centre employee, in Delhi have been making headlines after her live-in partner Aftab Poonawala was arrested by the Delhi Police on Monday.
Poonawala is accused of murdering Walkar in May this year, chopping the body into 35 pieces before dumping them at different places in the national capital over several days.
The murder case has shocked the nation and has also brought back memories of other gruesome killings in the past such as the Naina Sahni case, the Nithari killings as well as serial killers like Raja Kolander and Chandrakant Jha. The Anupama Gulati murder also shares chilling similarities with the Shraddha case.
Naina Sahni Murder Case: Sushil Sharma, a former politician, murdered his wife Naina Sahni at their home in Delhi on July 2, 1995. The high-profile murder case had become infamous as the "Tandoor Kand". Sharma chopped off his wife's body into pieces and stuffed it in a 'tandoor' (clay oven) on the roof of a popular restaurant, which was managed by his friend.
The police patrolling the area had reached the spot after seeing smoke coming out of the tandoor. They found Naina's dismembered and half-burnt body. DNA evidence and a second autopsy were used to establish the guilt of the accused, making it one of the landmark cases in India.
Nithari Killings: The sensational Nithari killings surfaced after the Noida Police found human remains in a drain. In December 2006, two Nithari village residents claimed to know the location of the remains of children who went missing. Both of them had daughters who had gone missing and they suspected Surinder Koli, the domestic help of being involved in the act as rising cases of missing children were linked with Koli's arrival in the village.
Former Resident Welfare Association (RWA) President SC Mishra and two residents searched the tank drain and one of the residents said he found a decomposed hand, after which they contacted the police.
The murders occurred in the house of businessman Moninder Singh Pandher in Sector-31, Noida near the UP village between 2005 and 2006. Koli had arrived as a house help to take care of the businessman's bungalow in his absence.
Main accused Surinder Koli had killed several children, mostly girls, chopping their bodies to pieces before throwing them in the backyard outside Pandher's house. He allegedly raped them after killing them and also indulged in cannibalism. He would then discard the remains in the drain.
Other sensational angles were attributed to the case as the matter unravelled including that of child pornography and organ trade, however, those were not proven.
Raja Kolander: Ram Nirajan, aka Raja Kolander, is accused of killing at least 15 people. Kolander is said to have brutally murdered several individuals in the 2000s but it was the killing of a local journalist that finally brought his misdeeds to the police's notice.
In the year 2000, Dhirendra Singh, a local journalist based in Allahabad, went missing without a trace. Later, his decapitated and mutilated body was found in the neighbouring state of Madhya Pradesh. Reportedly, the head and penis were missing from the rest of his body.
The course of the investigation led to Raja Kolander following which, the gruesome details of suspected cannibalism and other sensational practices emerged. The police recovered a personal diary with the names of many people including journalist Dheerendra Singh, Kolander and his brother-in-law Vakshraj had murdered all of those people.
Chandrakant Jha: A serial killer, Chandrakant Jha killed and dismembered 18 victims in west Delhi between 1998 and 2007. His first killing was in 1998 for which he was arrested but later released due to lack of evidence. As per the details available for the case, he befriended migrant labourers from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. He would help them get small jobs. However, he would murder these people by strangulation over petty disputes such as theft, lying, or simply being non-vegetarian.
Notably, Chandrakant used to mock the police by leaving dismembered body parts around the city and outside the Tihar Jail with notes, challenging them to catch him.
Both Chandrakant Jha and Raja Kolander were subjects of the Netflix documentary series 'Indian Predator' Seasons 1 and 2 respectively.
Anupama Gulati Murder Case & Its Chilling Similarities To Shraddha's Case
Twelve years before Shraddha Walkar's murder, Dehradun reported a similar ghastly case with the Anupama Gulati killing wherein her husband sawed her body into 72 pieces and froze them, before dumping them over several days.
The killers in both cases did not just use a saw to chop the body but also used a fridge or a deep freezer to conceal the pieces and the foul smell.
Like how Walkar's killer Aftab Poonawala kept going to the Chhatarpur forest area after midnight to dispose of the body parts, Anupama Gulati's husband Rajesh Gulati went to the Mussoorie diversion on Rajpur Road for days to dump the remains in a drain.
In both cases, the killers did not let their neighbours get a wind of their gruesome deeds for months.
As per news agency PTI's report, Anupama Gulati's husband misled her family and friends by sending them messages from her mail ID. Similarly, Poonawala kept updating Shraddha Walkar's social media status for weeks.
Anupama was killed on October 17, 2010, but it came to light on December 12, 2010, when her brother lodged a police complaint after having failed to make contact with his sister for several days. In Shraddha Walkar's case, a friend informed her brother about her phone being not reachable after which her father approached the police and lodged a missing complaint.
Anupama Gulati's husband Rajesh, a software engineer, is currently serving a life sentence.
(With Agency Inputs)
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