To get wife’s paramour arrested, man murders vendor, plants ‘proof’

Two weeks after a man murdered a vegetable vendor in Vasai and planted evidence at the scene to frame his wife’s lover, the Waliv police nabbed him from Uttar Pradesh.

The accused, Ashwinikumar Shrivastava, 38, would do odd jobs, said police.

He married Shikha, 26, six years ago and the couple was living in Rampur, Uttar Pradesh, with their two children.

Last year, Shikha left her husband and married Vijaykumar Yadav, a resident of Chinchoti in Vasai (East) and the two began living together.

Police said Ashwinikumar kept calling Shikha, pleading with her to return, but she refused.

She told him she had remarried, but did not divulge her current address, said police.

Ashwinikumar, however, managed to find out where Shikha and Vijaykumar lived.

He came to Vasai on February 11 and met a vendor, Pandu, at Juchandra.

As part of the plot to kill a stranger and frame Vijaykumar, Ashwinikumar got Pandu drunk. He then stabbed him 17 times in the neck, chest and abdomen at a desolate spot nearby, said Rajtilak Roshan, assistant superintendent of police, Vasai.

At 5.30 am the next day, locals found Pandu’s body and called the police, who found a key chain and a visiting card belonging to Vijaykumar in the dead man’s pocket. They then registered a case of murder, said inspector Sanjay Hazare of Waliv police station.

On questioning Vijaykumar, they found that the woman he was living with was married to another man. They traced Ashwinikumar to his sister’s house in Allahabad, UP and he confessed to the crime.

“Ashwinikumar told us that he planted the key chain and visiting card in Pandu’s pocket in the hopes that Vijaykumar would be arrested and Shikha would return to him. He was produced before a Vasai court and remanded in police custody,” said an officer.

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