Gurugram murder spree: Statements of accused, family members contradictory, say cops

He said the police were analysing CCTV footage, call detail records and other sources to fill the gaps pertaining to the four murders

The police said they found contradictions in statements given by the family members of a 59-year-old retired army subedar, who surrendered to the police after allegedly killing his daughter-in-law and three tenants at his Sector 105 residence on Tuesday. They will take the suspect to the crime scene to establish the correct sequence of events, officials said.

The murders took place early on Tuesday morning. (Parveen Kumar/HT Photo)

“The suspects, their son and daughter are changing their statements during questioning. On Thursday, they changed their statements at least seven times,” Deepak Saharan, the deputy commissioner of police, who is investigating the case, said.

“Although we have recorded his statement and his wife’s statement, before she was sent to judicial custody, the sequence of events will be recorded on camera. We want to match both the sequences to complete our dossier and this will be recorded for further proceedings,” Saharan said.

He said the police were analysing CCTV footage, call detail records and other sources to fill the gaps pertaining to the four murders that are likely to have taken place between 2am and 5am on Tuesday.

According to the police, the main suspect, Rao Rai Singh, told them that he killed his daughter-in-law, Sunita Yadav, 40, over a suspicion that she was having an extramarital affair with a tenant, Krishan Tiwari, 45. Singh allegedly confessed to also having killed the tenant, his wife Anamika Tiwari, 35 and their nine-year-old daughter.

A three-year-old daughter of the tenant survived the attack and was reported to be stable on Wednesday evening, after undergoing treatment at Safdarjung Hospital in Delhi. She was attacked four times on her head, neck, arms and chest, the police said.

A day after Singh’s surrender, the police arrested his wife, Bimlesh Yadav, 55, for her alleged involvement.

Saharan said that during the investigation, they found that Singh had been previously married and Bimlesh Yadav is his second wife. “His first wife died in mysterious circumstances within 10 months of getting married. She was cremated without a post-mortem examination. We are trying to check from her relatives and family members regarding Singh’s conduct,” Saharan said.

The police said that besides Singh’s son, a lawyer at the Gurugram court who claimed to be in Rajasthan at the time of the murders, they also questioned his daughter, who lives with her husband and in-laws in another part of the city. “The son of the suspect who was in Rajasthan when the crime took place has given evidence of his presence in a religious place but we are yet to establish the same,” Saharan said.

Saharan said that they analysed the son’s mobile phone and found it suspicious that there were only a few selfies from different locations earlier this week, but no other photos of the places he had visited. “We have checked his mobile and have scanned the data. He has only clicked selfies on Monday and Tuesday, which is unusual. We have recovered CCTV footage from a few locations and our three teams visited different spots in Rajasthan to check his sequence of events,” he said.

The family members and relatives of Sunita Yadav said they would meet the police commissioner on Friday and approach the court to get legal custody of her nine-year-old daughter, who was sleeping on the first floor at the time of the incident. The three-year-old daughter of the tenants will be taken to Siwan in Bihar by her relatives on Monday, the police said.