Poonawala started dating weeks after the murder: Police
HE BEFRIENDED WOMEN ON A DATING APP AND BROUGHT AT LEAST ONE DATE BACK TO THE FLAT IN CHHATTARPUR
NEW DELHI: Days after Aaftab Amin Poonawala purportedly disposed of the last body part of his former girlfriend Shraddha Walkar after allegedly murdering her and dismembering her body, he started dating again and brought at least one woman back to his south Delhi flat, police officers aware of the matter said.
On May 18, Poonawala, 28, allegedly strangled Walkar, 27, to death at their flat in Chhattarpur Pahadi, dismembered her body into 35 pieces, and stored the pieces in a refrigerator, before disposing of the body parts over three months, Delhi Police officers have said, citing Poonawala’s disclosure statement.
After he managed to dispose of the body, sometime in late August or early September, he started befriending women on the dating app Bumble -- the same app on which he said he first met Walkar -- and brought at least one date back to the flat in Chhattarpur, Poonawalla ostensibly said in his confession.
To be sure, Poonawala’s alleged confession before the police is not admissible as evidence in court, and Walkar’s father Vikas, in a first information report (FIR) registered at the Manikpur police station in Maharashtra, had said that his daughter and Poonawala first met at a Mumbai call centre they both worked at.
Officers aware of the development said police will now write to Bumble to get details of who all Poonawala befriended on the app. “He confessed in his questioning that sometime i n August-september, he had started going out on dates. He had met a woman who even came to the flat where he murdered Shraddha. We will contact the woman after getting her details from Poonawala’s call data records. We may write to Bumble to see if he befriended other people too. They could be of help to us,” an officer said.
The details of Poonawala’s profile and activities on Bumble and his call detail records could also help police ascertain if Walkar was killed as a result of his relationship with another person -- based on his confession, police say the murder occurred because Walkar had been pressuring him to marry her. An officer who questioned he suspect said, “Poonawala has told us that in early 2022, the couple had problems in their relationship. They decided to leave Maharashtra and shift to Delhi, where they could both find jobs. Poonawala said they wanted to save their relationship and thus visited Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand before coming to Delhi in the second week of May.”
But investigators are unsure if they should believe Poonawala’s claims of the couple having problems -- they point to an Instagram post by Walkar dated February 14, when the couple still lived in Maharashtra, which is a photo of them together with the caption “Happy days”.