Stalker murdered P’kula maid: Police

PANCHKULA: The 22-year-old domestic help found dead in a Sector-16 house in Panchkula was murdered by a stalker, police said on Saturday.

The victim, Preeti, native of Sultanpur, Uttar Pradesh, was found dead in a tub in the backyard of her employer’s six-marla house on March 28.

The accused, Mukul Kumar, 24, of Mauli village, Chandigarh, was arrested on Friday night with the help of Preeti’s phone call details, police said.

During the probe, the woman’s family members, who are settled in Panchkula’s Budanpur village, revealed that Kumar, a painter, had been harassing her to marry him, but Preeti had turned him down. He had since been threatening her.

“On May 28 evening, he entered the house of Preeti’s employer and strangled her with a plastic rope and fled,” said a police official, privy to the investigation. Kumar has been booked under Section 302 (murder) of the Indian Penal Code. He was produced before a local court on Saturday and sent to judicial custody.

VICTIM TOOK OVER MOTHER’S JOB

Preeti had started working at the Sector-16 house around a fortnight ago to help the house owner, who is in her 70s, and lives alone. Her mother previously worked at the house. The elderly woman’s three daughters are married and settled elsewhere.

The murder had come to light after a neighbour spotted the landlady sitting in her backyard for long even when it was raining.

The neighbour had sounded her son-in-law, who came at night and discovered Preeti’s body in the tub in the backyard and alerted the police.

The report of viscera samples sent to the Haryana Forensic Science Laboratory in Madhuban is awaited to establish the exact cause of death.