Delhi Live-In Partner Murder: How the murderer was caught through the banking app and Instagram

New Delhi:

How did Aftab Poonawala, the man who allegedly killed and dismembered his live-in partner Shraddha Walkar, which he scattered in a jungle six months ago, finally get arrested for murder? Police said he built a trail of Instagram chats and bank payments to show she left it alone, but that trail led to him instead.

Initially, after Shraddha Walkar’s father went to the police in Vasai near Mumbai last month, Aftab Poonawala was summoned for questioning on October 26. He told police that she had left their home in Chhatarpur in Delhi’s Mehrauli district after an altercation on May 22. .

He had already killed her four days before, as it turned out later. This was barely two weeks after they moved to Delhi.

When he said she only took her cell phone — leaving clothes and other belongings behind — investigators tracked phone activity, call details and signal location.

They found that Rs 54,000 had been transferred from Shraddha Walkar’s account to Aftab Poonawala’s account between May 22 and 26, using the banking app on her phone. The location was Chhatarpur in Mehrauli, near where they used to stay together. This heightened suspicion, as he had told police he had not had any contact with her “since she left on 22 May”.

He was summoned again for questioning on Nov. 11, when he told police he made the wire transfers because he had her phone and app passwords.

He had also paid her credit card bills so that bank officials would not go to her Mumbai address.

But the police meanwhile discovered that he had used her Instagram account to chat with her friends to project that she was alive. One of the chats, dated May 31, showed the location of the phone to be Mehrauli again, sources said. Officers from Vasai Police Station in Manikpur then contacted Delhi Police.

They detained him and asked the question that settled the matter: if she had left him on May 22, how was her location still Mehrauli? Aftab Poonawala then broke down and recounted the gruesome details, police sources told DailyExpertNews.

Aftab and Shraddha had started dating after meeting in Mumbai.

So far, he has led police to at least 10 of the 35 pieces of her body he dumped into a forest near their rented flat over 18 days.

Shraddha Walkar’s parents had not kept in contact with her since last year, it is understood, because they were angry about her interfaith (Hindu-Muslim) relationship with Aftab Poonawala. Her father was shocked last month when some of her friends told him she had no contact with them either.

Aftab Poonawala and Shraddha Walkar, both from Vasai, had met through a dating app in 2019. After living together in Mumbai and a long vacation in Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand early this year, they had moved to Delhi in May, just 10 days before he killed her. Her friends have since said she mentioned that Aftab had been violent during fights after she suspected he was cheating on her.