Sleuths comb Gurugram forests in hunt for body parts, weapon

As the forested areas where the searches are being made are dense with shrubs, police personnel on Saturday used hand-held metal detectors in their hunt for a weapon that Aaftab Poonawala might have used to dismember Shraddha Walkar’s body

A week after Delhi Police arrested Aaftab Amin Poonawala for the murder of his partner Shraddha Walkar, dismembering her body, and dumping the body parts in forested areas of city, the search for the body parts has been widened to Gurugram, officials aware of the matter said on Saturday.

A Delhi Police team at Gurugram’s DLF-Phase 1 forest area. (Parveen Kumar/HT Photo)

Poonawala, 28, is accused of killing Walkar, 27, at their flat in south Delhi’s Chhattarpur Pahadi on May 18. Though the suspect has claimed that he dumped her body parts in forested areas of Chhatarpur and Mehrauli, the police, noting his “deceptive nature”, have also been searching forested areas in other parts of south Delhi like Badarpur, as well as Gurugram, where Poonawala worked.

As the forested areas where the searches are being made are dense with shrubs, police personnel on Saturday used hand-held metal detectors in their hunt for a weapon that Poonawala might have used to dismember Walkar’s body. However, the search operations did not yield anything concrete related to the case, officers associated with the case said.

Meanwhile, the police are likely to conduct a narco test on Poonawala on Monday and are also likely to take him to Himachal Pradesh next week to search the spots the couple covered during a trip to the hill state this April. They went to Uttarakhand during the same vacation as well, said officers aware of the matter.

He is first likely to be taken to Kasol in Himachal Pradesh, said officers.

Kullu superintendent of police (SP) Gurdev Singh said: “We will provide whatever help is required to investigate the case. But so far, the Delhi Police has not contacted us.”