Police find body parts in woods near Surajkund
NEW DELHI/MUMBAI/GURUGRAM: Police on Thursday found decomposed bones stuffed inside a suitcase from a forest near Faridabad’s Surajkund, officers aware of the matter said, indicating that the recovery could be linked to the grisly murder of Shraddha Walkar allegedly by her boyfriend Aaftab Poonawala, who is also accused of hacking her body into at least 35 pieces and dumping them in multiple locations.
A senior police officer aware of developments also said that the probe team recovered CCTV footage from six months ago that showed Poonawala walking with a backpack in the south Delhi neighbourhood of Chhattarpur, where he shared a flat with Walkar for three days before allegedly killing her on May 18. This is the second such clip of Poonawala that has emerged since the probe began.
In Mumbai, another Delhi Police team collected Walkar’s dental records — the treatment, her case history and X-rays of her teeth — from a local dentist who treated her several times. Walkar’s dental records are crucial for investigators because though it doesn’t have any DNA
signatures, it could provide key clues for officers who recovered portion of a lower jaw from Gurugram six days ago. Police told a local court on Tuesday that they recovered a jaw and are running forensic tests to check if it belonged to Walkar.
DCP Narender Kadiyan said a person saw a suitcase lying unattended in the Aravalli forest area in Surajkund around 2pm and called the police. “The body parts were wrapped in polythene and kept in the blue suitcase. A Delhi address was mentioned on the bag following which we informed the team probing Walkar’s murder,” he said. Delhi Police have previously recovered bone fragments from forests in Chhattarpur and Gurugram, but forensic tests are yet to conclusively link them to Walkar. Police have also recovered a saw from the Chhattarpur flat and suspect that it may have been used by Poonawala to hack the body. To match DNA, police are using samples taken from Shraddha’s father Vikas Madan Walkar and brother Shreejay Vikas Walkar. The senior officer cited above added the recovered remains did not include a skull or any other identifiable body part.
The gruesome crime was unearthed last week after Poonawala ostensibly told the police that he murdered Walkar in their Chhattarpur flat six months ago, chopped her body for over two days, stored the pieces in a refrigerator for about three months, and dumped the body parts piece by piece in different parts of south Delhi and Gurugram. Police later said that the couple fought over finances on May 18 — three days