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Delhi: Wife drugs, murders man; stuffs body in a sack, dumps it in park
Senior police officers said the woman was fed up with her husband’s violence towards her and their two children. He was an unemployed alcoholic, police said, adding that the family lived on the woman’s earnings as a construction site worker
A 30-year-old woman was arrested for allegedly murdering her 32-year-old husband after first drugging him on Saturday in north-west Delhi’s Pitampura, police said, adding that after the murder, the woman allegedly took the help of her 13-year-old son to stuff the body in a burlap sack and carry it on the boy’s bicycle to a park about 800 metres from their home and dump it there .
Senior police officers said the woman, identified as Laxmi Devi, was fed up with her husband Bharat Lal’s violence towards her and their two children. He was an unemployed alcoholic, police said, adding that the family lived on the woman’s earnings as a construction site worker.
According to the police, Bharat Lal used to torture and assault Laxmi Devi in front of the children whenever she refused to give him money for liquor. She decided to kill him as he had also started beating up the children, said the officers.
On April 10 (Sunday) around 10pm, the Maurya Enclave police were informed about a man’s body that found stuffed in a jute bag and dumped outside a park in JP Block in Pitampura, said deputy commissioner of police (northwest) Usha Rangnani.
A police team reached the spot and recovered the body. The police began making enquiries in the neighbourhood to ascertain the deceased’s identity. Around that time, Laxmi Devi approached the police at the crime scene and identified the dead man as her husband Bharat Lal. She claimed that he was missing since the previous night (April 9) and she had been searching for him since Sunday morning.
“The sudden arrival of the woman at the spot where the body was found made the investigating team suspicious. During questioning, some discrepancies emerged in her statement,” said Rangnani.
Investigators took her to the construction site in Pitampura, where she worked and lived with her husband and two children. They searched the room and found a jute bag, similar to the one in which Bharat Lal’s body was stuffed. Also, the iron wire used for tying the sack was also found at the construction site.
Thereafter, they scanned CCTV cameras on the routes between the construction site and the place where the body was found. The footage showed the woman and her son carrying the body on a bicycle, the police said.
“We confronted the woman with the available evidence after which she broke down and confessed to killing her husband. The woman disclosed that she had been planning his murder for nearly a year but was delaying it, as she wanted to give Bharat Lal a chance to mend his ways. She had brought the sleeping pills from her native village in Madhya Pradesh’s Mahoba district,” said an investigator, asking not to be named.
On Saturday, around 11pm, the woman mixed about 15 sleeping pills in a bottle of liquor. When her husband became drowsy after consuming the liquor, she strangled him with a drawstring. After he died, she informed her son who was asleep at the time of the murder. She took his help in putting the body in the sack and transporting it to the park..
